


Unintended

by ignaz



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: Adoption, Closeted Character, Established Relationship, Kid Fic, M/M, Secret Relationship, honestly i don't think it's as saccharine as the tags make it sound, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-20 10:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11918865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignaz/pseuds/ignaz
Summary: When Simon announces he’s leaving American Idol, Ryan decides the time is finally right to do something he’s been wanting to do for a long time.





	1. Spin Cycle

**Author's Note:**

> All I can say is that I hate leaving things unfinished, no matter how old, dated, or ridiculous. I probably started this story around 2010, so that’s when it’s set. This is very much inspired by, if not a complete rip-off of, [Stick Figure Drawings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/97448) by quiesce, as well as [Imagine Me and You](http://archiveofourown.org/series/6142) by clio, and likely borrows from many other favorite stories in the collective Rymon-verse. I love you all. Thanks for being the best fandom I’ve ever been a part of.

He decided to take the six weeks. It had started out as a joke around the station, but why not? He was entitled to it. And he hadn’t taken that much time off from work since the first summer he’d gotten tall enough to push a lawnmower.

So. Six weeks. It was a lot, and he wasn’t without nerves, but it would be fine. He’d work from home sometimes. It could only help the radio show in the long run, his being away for a while. And he could still call in once or twice a week. At this point in his career, he could afford to take a break without the world forgetting who he was.

And everyone said those first weeks were so important. He’d been reading books and blogs (mostly blogs) and talking to professionals and to everyone he knew who’d done it, and that’s what they all said.

Actually, what everyone had said at first was: don’t.

“Wow,” said some of his friends.

“Really?” asked others.

His publicist had been frank. “Are you out of your _mind?_ ” she had asked, and then: “Ryan, Ryan, you are killing me. Look at me. I am a dead woman,” and later: “Do you _want_ to torpedo the last twenty years of your professional life?”

She’d pleaded with him. “Wouldn’t you like to do this some other way? It’ll take a little time, but I’m sure I can line up some women who would be glad to help you out, no long-term commitment. What do you say?”

She’d bargained. “Okay,” she’d said. “Maybe I can spin it like—you got someone pregnant, all right? Some one-night stand or whatever, and she kept it, but didn’t tell you, and then she shows up out of the blue and—bam. And you had no choice but to step in, because you’re a stand-up guy, right?”

Finally, she’d said it. “You realize what this is, right? You know what people will say.”

And that was it, of course. Not the only reason he was scared to death of doing this, but a very big one.

But the hell with it. He’d just have to deal with damage control when it happened, if it happened. He wanted to do this, he wasn’t getting any younger, and he was never going to be better situated to do it than he was now. _Idol_ was on break, which meant he had more free time and was less in the limelight. Simon was back in England, possibly for good, although he’d denied it. Maybe Ryan’s big news would even drum up more interest in a new, Simon-less _Idol_.

But mostly, it was time. He was doing this.

And if he was doing this, he was taking the six weeks.

* * *

When Jenna arrives, it becomes apparent that six weeks won’t be enough. Ryan thinks he might never work again. It’s not like he needs to. He can already afford to send her to the best schools in Southern California, to the best summer camps in Europe, to college at Harvard (which she is clearly smart enough to get into, he can tell, even at just three years old); to buy her a private jet (and hire the best, safest, most qualified pilot in the world to fly it); to give her everything she deserves and more—and in the meantime he’ll hang out at home with her, watching as she mashes Play-Doh into the rugs and smears applesauce on her perfect round little face all day long. With a little planning, they should be able to live comfortably until she’s at least his age.

He realizes after a while that this is insane, and unhealthy, and that she might someday start to resent having her dad—and how weird and great was it to have that word apply to him?—following her every move. Like when she starts dating, which he figures he’ll allow when she’s around 30. He also starts to suspect that staying awake most of the night to make sure she’s sleeping well is not doing much for him as a human being, and that if he keeps up with his current rate of shopping for tiny designer clothes, and weird but supposedly educational toys made out of organic wood and alpaca fur—not to mention the stroller that cost more than his first car—then her Harvard tuition, adjusted for fifteen years of inflation, might not be so easy to come by.

So after six weeks, he heads back to work full-time—carrying her into the station on his hip.

Jenna sits in the control booth with her nanny and the producers and a bevy of toys to keep her busy once the novelty of the studio wears off. The first time she hears what Simon refers to as Ryan’s radio voice, her eyes go wide and she leans closer to her nanny, alarmed by this man who looks like but sounds completely different from the man who feeds her and plays with her and puts her to bed each night.

Everyone at work adores her, as they should, since she is the most beautiful and talented child who ever toddled the earth. Also, he’s the boss, but he’s pretty sure it’s because Jenna is perfect in every way.

They have a longstanding agreement, so he lets _People_ have the first photos. He gives the writer a few happy quotes on fatherhood, and the following week, for Father’s Day, the magazine runs a puff piece, a few pages and three pictures and absolutely no references to any other aspect of his life besides parenting and work—which is, honestly, 95% of his life right now anyway.

The media are fascinated: a single guy, adopting a child on his own, no mother, no partner. Some of the seedier blogs drop hints about his _confirmed bachelor_ -ness—or worse—but he expected that and takes it in stride. He steers clear of ONTD.

It’s not always easy doing it alone, that much is true. Of course he has family and friends, and professional help, including a nanny who he’s mostly paying to do dishes and laundry and the occasional meal while he plays with his daughter. His mother, over the moon to finally be a grandma, spends two weeks with them, doting on Jenna as much as he does. At the end of the day, though, no matter how lucky he is—and he knows that he’s incredibly, unbelievably lucky—he is still, technically, a single parent.

But not a single guy. If he had a Facebook page, his relationship status would be “It’s complicated,” though it’s really not: they are together, they are monogam- _ish_ , and while they’ve never talked about it, there’s no anticipated end date to this thing they have between them. Mostly, it’s good, even when it’s long-distance. Sometimes it’s even great. Or at least it always had been before.

But Simon does not want children. Has never wanted children and never will. He was always clear about that, from their earliest acquaintance, just as clear as Ryan has always been that he _does_ want them—did want them, and might want _more_ , even with all the challenges inherent in that, both in general and for him in particular. He’d figured early on that it would never happen—biology and sexuality being pretty firmly against him—but over the years, as he watched more and more people in what his publicist termed his “situation” have kids anyway, it had started to seem like an actual possibility.

So with Simon’s bemused blessing, and the knowledge that he wanted nothing to do with it—but still, at least for now, wanted something to do with Ryan—Ryan went ahead and got himself a kid.

* * *

Simon is in London when Jenna arrives, which is deliberate on Ryan’s part, and Ryan tries not to bother him with the concerns of his new life as a father—which is next to impossible, because Jenna is all Ryan can think about. But he doesn’t want to be that kind of parent, especially not with Simon, and so every time they speak, he fills the conversation with other topics until Simon asks about Jenna, and then he answers in as short and subdued a manner as he can, though by now he’s little more than a broken fountain of Jenna info, constantly bubbling over.

A few times, Simon even speaks to Jenna directly. Ryan puts them on speaker and sits Jenna on his lap, and Simon talks to her in his best speaking-to-a-child voice, asking her questions that Ryan has to answer on her behalf when Jenna turns out to be too shy to answer them herself. Simon asks what her favorite color is, and after a moment she smiles and buries her face in Ryan’s neck, too timid to say.

“It’s pink,” Ryan says, as if Simon cares.

“Oh, that’s very nice,” Simon says to Jenna, his voice still tailored for toddlers. “That’s your daddy’s favorite color, too,” and Ryan purses his lips and tries not to roll his eyes where Jenna can see them.

* * *

Jenna has been his for four weeks when the paparazzi get her.

He hadn’t noticed the guy with the camera at the time, but when he sees the pictures later, he recognizes when they were taken. He’d been distracted, walking Jenna from preschool to the car, listening to her talk about a picture she’d drawn that day. He’s been distracted a lot lately; Jenna can be very distracting, but only in the best possible ways. He looks at the picture, sees himself holding his daughter’s hand, sees her sweet face, happy and innocent, on Defamer, and grinds his teeth so hard his jaw hurts.

It was so unfair. Yes, he was a part of the machine willingly, it was how he made his living, and sometimes—most of the time—he loved it. It had paid him back and then some. But it came at a price, and it had taken _so damn much_ from him over the years—did it have to take this, too?

He starts typing out a text to his assistant, asking her to look into—he doesn’t even know. His fingers move faster than his brain. Security? Does he want them surrounded by bodyguards every time they leave the house? He deletes the text, cursing under his breath. He feels ridiculous and powerless. For a moment he’s overtaken by the impulse to quit, to quit everything, sell the house, pack all their things, and move someplace far away from Hollywood where there are no vipers with cameras lurking around every corner. Maybe back home to Atlanta.

He sighs and reasons with himself. The occasional picture isn’t the end of the world. He knows better than to read the comments, and Jenna can’t read. When she’s big enough to use the computer, he’ll install Net Nanny. And maybe he should look into a new preschool.

In the meantime, he keeps his head down, does what he can to protect their fragile privacy, and throws himself into parenting the way he’s always thrown himself into work—because after all, isn’t that the most valuable legacy? The best way of ensuring that you’re remembered, and remembered well, after you’re gone?

He’s built a multimedia empire, he’s made more money than he ever could have imagined. But who cares? When he looks at Jenna, that’s what matters: doing this one thing right, making this one small person into a happy, healthy, fully grown person. If he can manage to do that, he’ll have done everything.


	2. Lost in Translation

It was mad, what Ryan was doing, but what was Simon going to do about it—say no? Knowing Ryan as he did, Ryan would only go ahead and do it anyway, and then they would have had an ugly fight for nothing. So Simon was supportive, or at least as supportive as he could manage, while still making his point of view crystal clear—this was to be Ryan’s project, _not_ a joint venture—and privately being certain that it was a disaster in the making.

Simon is in London when Ryan gets the child, which is just as well, as he wouldn’t know what to do if he were in Los Angeles. He has his PA select an age-appropriate gift for the child (a book) and a card for Ryan and sends them both with his congratulations, feeling awkward about the whole thing, and then resentful of Ryan for making him feel awkward.

When they’re not in the same city, he and Ryan speak on the phone almost every day, but it’s several days after the arrival of Ryan’s child before Simon hears from him. He supposes that’s to be expected; Ryan is certainly going to be busier now, if that’s possible. Simon wants to give him his space, allow him time to get used to having a child around, without getting involved or getting in the way. It only makes sense to take a step back.

Still, when they next talk, it’s a very strange conversation. He says “How are you” and Ryan gives him a vague response. “Everything going well?” he asks, and Ryan’s answer is similarly brief and general. He’s fine, everything’s fine, it’s all good. “Well,” Simon says, “that’s good,” and then there’s silence on the line. Simon wonders if he’s called during a bad time, but normally Ryan wouldn’t hesitate to say so, or more likely not pick up in the first place.

They chat about impersonal things, business-related, until Ryan sighs and says he has to go. After he hangs up, Simon is left feeling unsettled, wondering if he’s done something wrong, mis-stepped somehow in this strange new area—worrying that this is how it’s going to be between them from now on.

But the next time they speak, it’s better. Having given Ryan time to adjust, he asks directly about the child, and Ryan tells him a few things: how old, what she’s like, her name—which Simon already knows, obviously, because yes this is Ryan’s thing, but he’s not a _complete_ arsehole, despite rumours to the contrary. And at each subsequent conversation he learns a bit more, and a bit more, until he starts to feel like he might finally have a grip on this massive change in Ryan’s life.

Of course it’s all fairly boring. Simon likes children fine, has several godchildren and nieces and nephews, but they’re not the most fascinating topic of conversation. Still, he makes the effort for Ryan’s sake. It may be the first time in the history of their relationship that he’s made an effort to pay attention to one of Ryan’s projects that didn’t directly involve him.

Sometimes Jenna is in the room with Ryan while they’re on the phone, and then their conversations are short and stilted. Sometimes Simon can tell when Jenna walks into the room by the way Ryan’s voice changes.

“—they’re talking about—hold on,” Ryan says once, and then, sounding far away: “What is it, sweetie?”

Simon hears a murmur but can’t make out any words.

“I’m talking to my friend,” Ryan says, not to him.

The murmur sounds closer this time, but the words are still unintelligible.

“His name is Simon, baby. Where’s Ashleigh? ... uh, okay, yeah, you can sit on my lap,” Ryan says, uncertain, and then to Simon: “Hang on a sec?”

“Put her on,” Simon says without thinking.

There’s a second or two of silence. “What?”

“Put her on,” Simon says again, already regretting it but committed now. What could it hurt?

“Um, okay,” Ryan says. “Hang on ... okay, you’re on speaker. Jenna, say hi to Daddy’s friend Simon.”

Absolute silence.

Simon takes a deep breath. “Hello, Jenna,” he says in the cheery, slightly patronizing voice he reserves for speaking to children and idiots and sometimes to Ryan. “How are you?”

More silence, and then Ryan: “Uh, I guess she’s feeling a little shy now.”

“That’s all right,” Simon says, his voice now wavering halfway between patronizing and normal, unsure of himself. “I should be going anyway.” He’d actually been hoping to talk to Ryan about his next trip back to L.A., but the moment had obviously passed.

“Right, I—I’ll call you tomorrow?” Ryan sounds almost _nervous_ about it, which makes no sense.

“Of course,” Simon says. “Bye now—bye, Jenna,” he adds, and then quickly hangs up.

Later phone calls would see an improvement in repartee on both sides, until Simon was able to get a bashful “Hi” out of Jenna, an accomplishment he was tremendously proud of for several minutes before he was able to get a grip on himself. He had built a empire and made millions; he was an internationally renowned success and a household name. Winning over a small child, even Ryan’s small child, was nothing.

After all, he’d won over _Ryan_ , hadn’t he?

And what an unexpected challenge that had been. He hadn’t quite known what to make of Ryan at first. Simon had been to southern California before filming _American Idol_. It had always seemed to him like a different planet, populated by beautiful aliens. And Ryan—Ryan _aggressively_ personified southern California. From the moment Simon had seen him, it was all he could think of. Ryan smiled too wide and too bright, his hair defied gravity and his clothes all explanation, and Simon had never seen anyone quite so ... orange.

Ryan was obviously meant to be the “cute” one of the pair of hosts they’d hired for the American _Pop Idol_ , and so Simon had expected him to be a dim prettyboy of the sort that littered the entertainment industry on both sides of the Atlantic, riding on their looks until the looks began to fade. It had come as a shock when Ryan turned out to be quite clever—and what’s more, _funny_. Which was not to say he wasn’t also incredibly annoying, more and more so as they segued into doing live shows. But in the early days, Ryan was actually funny, and fun, and it wasn’t long until Simon decided he had to have him.

He remembered the night well. They were still doing auditions, that first year of the show. They had been in some flyover state, he had lost track of exactly where—the hours were long, the travel was pre-arranged; his American geography had never been strong to begin with and he’d seen no reason to brush up for a one-series, three-month television programme that would likely be cancelled before the third episode managed to air—but the high proportion of auditioners in cowboy hats made him think somewhere in the south.

After the cameras had been packed up for the day, they’d headed out for a night on the town. It had been Simon, Ryan, and Randy, and although Simon quite liked Randy, he had been irritated by Randy’s joining them that night. Randy, it turned out, was a fan of country music, and had insisted on their going to what he called a “honky tonk” to get the “real experience.” He also insisted on their drinking the local whiskey. Ryan was game for both of these activities, while Simon had felt a headache starting the moment they crossed the threshold, which only got worse by the hour. He hated country music, and although he was nobody remarkable in this small southern American town—at least not until he spoke—he nonetheless felt self-conscious, impossibly British and _foreign_. And Ryan ...

Ryan is many things, Simon knows—Simon knows this better than most. Ryan is annoying. Ryan is ingratiating. Ryan is extremely good at what he does, and disarmingly likeable. He is also, and this was particularly true in 2002, _eye-catching_ , in ways that don’t bear mentioning, least of all in redneck bars in the suburban American South.

Ryan had been wearing jeans that hugged his hips and arse and left little to the imagination, the kind that cost $200 but look worn and ragged straight off the rack. He’d been wearing a garish and tissue-thin t-shirt that showed his nipples and that was probably considered fashionable in circles with which Simon no longer associated, and some sort of necklace-choker- _collar_ , which had prompted Simon to crack a dog-related joke earlier in the day amidst some disturbing thoughts that he’d kept to himself. In those days Ryan’s hair had been bleached and spiky, his grooming impeccable, and he hadn’t bothered to remove any of his makeup after filming stopped. He’d looked a bit like a cheap rent boy. He’d seemed oblivious to the people cutting eyes at him, but Simon had felt the stares on his behalf, and he did not care for them.

Both Ryan and Randy had been in good spirits. After a bit they’d moved back to the quieter hotel bar, and shortly Randy decided to call it a day, leaving Simon alone with Ryan at a dark corner table.

It was late, and Simon had been slightly pissed after several hours of drinking. He wasn’t drunk, not quite, but he thought he could use it as an excuse later, if necessary. The bar was nearly empty, and even if it hadn’t been, they were anonymous here—one of the last times they would ever be anonymous, Simon would reflect years later.

The table had a small white candle in a glass holder on it, flickering away. Simon stared at Ryan, at his blond hair and young face, smile slightly tired and slightly mischievous, and that bizarre collar thing he wore round his throat, and noticed in the candlelight that Ryan’s eyes were very green.

Impulsively, he reached out and touched the necklace.

Ryan’s smile melted away. He flinched, then froze, but did not pull back from Simon’s fingers.

It was a strand of leather, Simon thought, or an artificial imitation thereof, dark brown, perhaps an eighth of an inch wide. It bore a silver bead, or possibly a clasp of some sort, he couldn’t really tell with only the one finger touching it. The metal was warm to the touch, warmed no doubt by Ryan’s skin.

Ryan swallowed. Simon saw it and felt it, Ryan’s throat moving under the tips of his own fingers. He slid one finger under the leather and gave it a very small tug.

Ryan inhaled sharply through his nose.

Simon felt superheated, completely alive. “Why don’t you come upstairs with me?” he said, sotto voce. He looked away from his fingers on Ryan’s throat and looked back at Ryan’s candlelit green eyes.

Ryan was staring back at him, very quiet. His lips parted as if to speak, then his tongue darted out to wet the lower one. He closed his mouth, breathed in deeply through his nose, and then said, almost in a whisper, “I can’t.”

Simon frowned. He couldn’t have been wrong about this—could he? He’d read all the signals. He knew Ryan was gay; it was hardly a secret on set. He also knew Ryan wasn’t seeing anyone else, so it couldn’t be that.

Ryan’s head shook infinitesimally and he closed his eyes. “I can’t,” he said again, and this time Simon heard the regret in it, the longing.

“Why?” he asked, finger still pressed to Ryan’s throat. But then Ryan shifted, and Simon let his hand fall away, knowing the moment was gone.

Ryan opened his eyes again and bit his lower lip, and now Simon could _see_ the regret on Ryan’s face. It cheered him a little in spite of his disappointment and confusion.

“I just,” Ryan said, and then started again: “It’s a bad idea.”

“Why?” Simon asked a second time, thinking Ryan looked like someone who wanted to be persuaded.

“We work together,” Ryan said, as if this explained everything.

“So?”

Ryan blinked. “So ... I don’t want to sleep with someone I’m working with.”

They were going in circles. Simon resisted the urge to say something cutting, something cruel in his frustration: he might still have a chance, and he could tell that, despite the leather collar, _that_ sort of persuasion would not work on Ryan. “I don’t mind,” he said instead.

Ryan half smiled, or maybe it was a wince. “It’s different for you,” he said softly.

Ryan looked him in the eyes, and Simon looked back. He gazed at Ryan, and thought about Ryan. And though it pained him, he thought he understood.

“Right,” he said with finality, leaning back and gently smacking his hand—the one that had, minutes earlier, been so close to Ryan’s tender neck—against the flat surface of their table. “Well. That’s that, then, isn’t it?”

Ryan seemed to deflate a little, and gave Simon a rueful smile. “I guess.”

Simon got out his wallet, full of still-strange American money. He felt vaguely like Ryan owed him, but that was ridiculous. And after all, he’d seen Ryan’s car. The evening—all their evenings, if they continued to have such evenings—would be on him.

Which was the problem, of course. At least part of the problem, anyway.

The next day, Simon had been irritable, and had been ruder than usual with Ryan. Ryan had taken it well enough for a while until it got to be too much, and then he’d started lashing out in turn. Eventually, of course, they both got over it and were friends again.

And they had flirted. _God_ how they’d flirted. Simon held out hope that Ryan would change his mind, perhaps realise that the show wasn’t going to last and that he had nothing to lose by having a bit of fun, but before long it was clear that the show _was_ going to last, was actually going to be a smash hit, and they were going to be working together for a good long time. And then Ryan had started dating someone, someone not Simon, and for a year they were nothing more than very good friends who fought and flirted in equal measure.

And when, at last, Ryan _had_ gone to bed with him, it hadn’t gone at all like he’d expected. Ryan hadn’t bent over for him—in fact, Ryan had fucked _him_ , and brilliantly at that.

(Although it had been a relief, later, to learn that this was not Ryan’s usual preference, but only a power play, an attempt at “getting his own” after years of abuse, and that Ryan was in fact, and as long suspected, almost a complete and total bottom. Simon was glad to know he’d been right about at least _one_ thing.)

Now, more than a decade into their relationship, Simon had to acknowledge that the strange young American man with whom he’d hoped to have a sweet, short, summer fling was one of the most important things in his life.

And now that man wanted a child. Well, he had always been slightly off.

And Simon wasn’t about to give him up over something as simple as that. He had _worked_ for Ryan. He had _earned_ Ryan.

They would simply have to adjust.


	3. The Queen of England

When Simon first meets Jenna in person, he is playfully formal, stooping to offer her his hand and a “How do you do?” With Ryan’s encouragement, she gives him her hand in return, and they exchange a very solemn handshake, after which she wriggles and clings to Ryan’s legs, giving Simon a smile from behind Ryan’s knee. Simon has brought her a gift, a stuffed bear wearing a British flag sweater, and Jenna has roughly 10,000 stuffed animals, but she holds onto the Union Jack bear the entire time Simon is visiting them, and at night she gives it a privileged position in her already over-full bed.

Ryan’s own bed is somewhat _less_ full than it usually is when Simon’s in town; between one thing (work) and another (Jenna), they have yet to share more than dinner and some stray kisses. It’s not that Ryan isn’t interested—and he can tell, as he always can, that Simon is _very_ interested—but as the saying goes, the mind is willing but the flesh is weak. He still sees plenty of Simon, only upright and clothed. And Simon has been going back to his own house every night to sleep.

It’s weird for them. After all these years, Simon doesn’t just have a toothbrush at Ryan’s, he has an entire wardrobe, and Ryan’s used to him sleeping over more than not.

Ryan’s heard plenty from his lesbian friends about “lesbian bed death,” and he’s heard about couples who stopped having sex after having kids, but there’s nothing in his parenting blogs that covers this particular situation. He wonders how long it will last.

He wonders how long Simon will put up with it.

On the third night Simon is there, Ryan is putting Jenna to bed, holding the book they’ve been reading together for the last month, when Jenna stops him with a tiny hand on his arm. She looks over at her bedroom doorway, where Simon is trying to be inconspicuous.

“You want Simon to read to you?” Ryan guesses, and she smiles, bashful, and nods.

Ryan shoots him an apologetic look, but Simon doesn’t seem to mind. He borrows Ryan’s reading glasses, Jenna shows him where she wants him to start, and he reads to her slowly, voice animated, even making cursory attempts at different character voices. Jenna listens, enraptured. Ryan stands in the doorway and silently dies a little.

When the book is closed, foreheads have been kissed, and lights are off, Ryan walks them down the hall and apologizes.

“Why?” Simon asks, almost offended.

“Because I know you don’t ...” Ryan shrugs.

“Just because I don’t want kids doesn’t mean I don’t _like_ them, Ryan,” Simon says, now sounding just this side of annoyed. “I like spending time with your daughter. She’s very sweet and quite clever, despite her dubious parentage,” and if Simon had meant Jenna’s birth parents, Ryan would have slapped him, but he’s only calling Ryan dumb again, which Ryan is used to, so he ignores it.

“Still, if you ever need me to rescue you, just—give some kind of signal.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Simon says, striding past him down the hall to the master bedroom. Ryan casts a look back at Jenna’s closed bedroom door, and then follows.

“She seems to like you a lot,” Ryan says to Simon’s back as it disappears into the connecting bathroom. He sits down on his side of the bed and rubs his bare feet back and forth against the carpet.

“Most children do. I’m very charming,” Simon’s disembodied voice comes through the open door.

“They recognize you as a peer,” Ryan retorts. A moment later, regretting it almost before the words are even out of his mouth, he adds, “I think Jenna’s actually kind of smitten.”

Simon pops his head around the door frame. “Like father, like daughter,” he smirks and then disappears again. Ryan hears the water running in the sink.

Simon comes out of the bathroom, smelling minty, and walks across the bedroom to Ryan. He stands in front of Ryan, puts a hand under his chin, and tips his face upward so Ryan meets his gaze.

“You look tired,” Simon says, and it’s only because Ryan has known him so long that he hears the actual concern in Simon’s voice.

“I _am_ tired,” Ryan says. “I thought having you around would’ve given me practice at having a child in the house, but—yeah, it’s exhausting.”

“You chose this,” Simon says.

“And I don’t regret it.”

“Can’t send it back now.”

“Simon,” Ryan says, a bit of a warning.

Simon leans down to kiss him, an apology, and then pulls back. He looks at Ryan’s face, studying him. “You’re a good dad,” he finally says, and then: “I knew you would be,” so it’s not so much a compliment for Ryan as it is a confirmation of Simon’s genius.

Simon’s fingers stroke the back of Ryan’s head and neck, and then a sly look appears on his face. “So can I call you ’Daddy’ now?”

“Not unless you want me to change the locks,” Ryan says.

Simon laughs, then kisses him again, longer this time. Ryan kisses back, fisting Simon’s thin t-shirt between his fingers with both hands. But when Simon’s hands go for Ryan’s shirt buttons, Ryan pulls away.

“If we’re doing this,” he says, “we have to keep the door locked. If we sleep, we sleep in our clothes. If she knocks, I have to answer it, and you have to go in there and hide.” He points to the bathroom.

“Okay,” Simon answers, sounding halfway between amused and offended.

“I don’t want her getting scarred for life.”

“Bit of a lost cause, living with you, isn’t it?” Simon asks. Ryan gives him a shove, but Simon only smirks at him and goes over to close and lock the bedroom door.

“I mean it,” Ryan says, getting up to pull down the sheets before climbing back into bed and lying down. “I don’t want to end up in some _Mommy Dearest_ -type tell-all.”

“You _would_ think of yourself as Joan Crawford, wouldn’t you?” Simon returns to the bed and reaches for him again.

Afterwards, he does not sleep over.

* * *

For a while after the first paparazzo pic, Ryan and Jenna slip under the radar. There’s a snap of them in a park that runs in _Us Weekly_ , with his permission, alongside a dozen other photos of celebrities with their kids. He can control the print magazines and mainstream websites; it’s the fringe stuff that worries him.

Most places they go, they’re accompanied by Jenna’s nanny, who in addition to being a nanny is also a broadcast journalism major at UCLA. Ashleigh is tiny and blonde and looks exactly like Ryan’s “type,” if he had a real type that included women, exactly like Shana and most of the women he’s been photographed with over the years, and half the reason he hired her is so that the nastier gossip blogs can insinuate that he’s fucking her. She’s also, of course, a very good nanny, and as far as he knows, a very good broadcast journalism student. In a few years, when she graduates and Jenna is in school full time, he’ll get her a decent entry-level job at E! She has, obviously, signed an iron-clad confidentiality agreement.

They’re also accompanied by their new bodyguard, although he tends to hang back, at Ryan’s request. Jose is thick and stone-faced and happens to be Ryan’s _actual_ type, but is straight, with a girlfriend and a daughter of his own. He’s there mostly to keep the more aggressive paparazzi away from Jenna, out of her and Ryan’s hearing range.

Increasingly, though, Ryan has less and less time to do things like worry. Jenna is starting swimming lessons, in addition to her weekly Toddler Tumbling class at the baby gym David Beckham recommended. Ryan is fully back to work, and in a few weeks he’ll be on the road for _Idol_ , kid and nanny and bodyguard in tow. Between Jenna and work and more Jenna, he no longer has time to go out for staged dinner dates with aspiring actresses, but at least now his “I’m too busy to date” is the actual, honest-to-god truth. His publicist still tries to set things up every now and then, but Ryan finds that he doesn’t really care.

Instead, he makes time for what matters: Jenna, and their friends and family. He doesn’t want to be that guy who foists his kid on everyone around him, but luckily most of the people in his life seem to like Jenna just fine on her own merits. They have regular playdates and visitors. His mom flies in once a month these days.

Every one of his friends becomes “Aunt this” and “Uncle that,” but Simon never becomes “Uncle Simon.” The one time Simon tries it on, Ryan shuts him down immediately—”You’re not her uncle, I’m not your brother, don’t forget I _know_ your brothers”—and Simon lets it go. Ryan doesn’t examine his motivations too closely. There’s just something wrong about it and he doesn’t want to hear it. So Simon remains “Simon.”

He worries that he’s not spending enough time with Simon, just the two of them, but he hates to miss any time with Jenna. He hates to miss time with Simon, too, but that’s a different issue.

At first it’s awkward, making Simon get up and go home after sex, throwing Simon out in the middle of the night the way he had during their first weeks together. It’s probably, he has to admit, not great for their relationship. But they’ve never done things the normal way, and after all, Ryan has other relationships to think about now. There is a (very small) woman in his life.

And Simon seems to take it in good humor. He isn’t avoiding Ryan or Jenna; he’s spending about as much time at Ryan’s house as ever, which is to say most of it, except overnights. But their hours have always been different enough that they’ve hardly ever managed to do much actual sleeping together, so that isn’t too much of a change.

If Ryan sometimes misses waking up to Simon snoring next to him, well, he’ll get over it.


	4. International Relations

_This isn’t going to work_ , he thinks, driving back to his own house after leaving Ryan’s—Ryan’s and Jenna’s—one summer evening after midnight.

 _It’s too much_ , he thinks. He never wanted children, Ryan knows that—and Ryan having a child is ... well, it’s ...

 _It’s terrifying_ , he thinks, and then shoves the thought from his mind, because how on earth could Ryan’s decision be frightening? Ryan hadn’t committed _him_ to anything. Ryan’s mistakes had no effect on him.

And it was a mistake, just as he’d predicted. He remembered that first day, nervous, pulling into the driveway, bearing gifts, letting himself into the house ( _Ryan’s and Jenna’s house_ ) with his key, half expecting the locks to have been changed now that this house wasn’t only Ryan’s. Seeing Ryan face to face for the first time in weeks, his face mottled with beard stubble and lines, exhausted, bags under his eyes, pale despite the California sun. He hadn’t looked this run-down, Simon thought, since that year he was trying to juggle Idol and his other television show and had been sleeping four hours a night, that year when Simon had been genuinely worried for him—and about him.

And when Simon appeared in the living room, the smile Ryan turned on him had been forced—not the usual sunbeam he bestowed on Simon whenever Simon let himself into the house like he belonged there (did he? Now that this house wasn’t only Ryan’s, but _Ryan and Jenna’s?_ ). There was tension in him, and not merely the tension of a man who hadn’t slept properly in a month. No, Ryan had been anxious, anxious in a way he’d become a professional at hiding from the public but that Simon could always see right through, the way he’d always seen through Ryan, right to the core of him.

Ryan smiled forcefully under his nascent beard and said, “I wasn’t expecting you.”

Simon held his gift bag aloft. “I brought something for—” _The kid?_ “—Jenna,” he decided to say, hoping the stutter hadn’t been obvious.

“What is it?”

Simon reached into the bag and held the stuffed bear up for Ryan’s inspection. Something in Ryan’s face seemed to relax.

“That’s nice,” he said. “You didn’t have to.”

“I do know one or two things about children,” Simon said, and then looked around. “Where is she?”

“Preschool,” Ryan said, then stretched his arms over his head, back cracking slightly. He put his hands on his hips and stared at Simon for a moment. “Come here.”

Simon realized that he’d been standing awkwardly several feet away from Ryan since he’d arrived, which just wouldn’t do—at least not now that he knew they were alone. He crossed the room and took Ryan in his arms, gift bag still dangling from his fingers.

“Mmm, that’s better,” Ryan said into his mouth. “You don’t have to be afraid, Simon. It’s not contagious.”

Simon pulled back to scrutinize Ryan’s face. He didn’t like the beard any better from this distance. “What isn’t contagious?”

“Fatherhood,” Ryan said, and kissed him swiftly on the cheek.

* * *

Later, while Ryan was putting Jenna to bed (“Make yourself comfortable, this could take a while,” Ryan had warned), Simon wandered through the house, which he had to admit didn’t look all that different from how he’d left it. Ryan, or more likely Ryan’s housekeeper, had kept the proof that a child lived here mostly confined to Jenna’s bedroom, the nursery, and the kitchen with its high chair at the table and childish artwork on the refrigerator.

His journey took him to the library, where he found more subtle evidence: below the fiction shelves (including the complete _Twilight_ ), a row of childcare books. _The Conscious Parent_. _The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers_. _Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking_. There were nearly a dozen. Simon grabbed one at random. The spine hadn’t been cracked; it had clearly never been opened. He replaced it and took another—same thing. Ryan hadn’t read _any_ of these books. What did Ryan know about child care? Simon knew he’d never even looked after any children, apart from his younger sister. Being a godfather and an older brother were one thing—Simon was also a godfather, and an older brother, and he knew nothing about raising children. _My god_ , he thought, _should he even be_ allowed _to have a child?_

There was an enormous leather armchair in the library, which Simon himself had bought some years back, dark chocolate in color and incredibly comfortable. On the massive mahogany desk that Ryan barely used sat a pair of reading glasses, his or Ryan’s, he couldn’t remember which. He selected the least pretentious-looking of Ryan’s unread childcare guides and took it over to the chair, settling in to wait until this long putting-to-bed process was complete. If someday a situation called for childrearing expertise, and he was the one to provide it to Ryan—well, that was an opportunity he wouldn’t miss.

He had never, not once in his life, wanted children. Not when he was younger, not when he was broke, not when he’d been dating women. Children were absolutely at odds with the life he wanted. He had no use whatsoever for babies; older children were charming in their way, but the idea of raising one gave him chills. A part of him had always thought that people who longed for that sort of responsibility—the life, the well-being of a small, defenseless person, resting entirely on one’s shoulders—must be slightly insane. He could at least understand the biological drive, the egotistical need to create another living being in one’s own image—let no one ever say he was not aware of his ego—but that hardly explained what Ryan had done.

Simon had also known his share of people, especially in Hollywood, for whom having a child was like having a designer handbag or a trendy breed of dog. But that wasn’t Ryan either. Oh, he was faddish enough—always trying some absurd new California thing, acai smoothies and kombucha tea and CrossFit, godawful tee shirts with idiotic slogans when he was younger. Not with this, though. Even if Simon had suspected it, seeing how Ryan was with Jenna would have put those concerns to rest.

No, what Ryan had done was get himself emotionally entangled. Simon had read something once, that having a child was like letting your heart wander around outside your body. He couldn’t begin to understand it, why anyone would choose to become part of something like this, to make himself so vulnerable.

He and Ryan were much alike in all the ways that counted—similar drive and ambition, compatible senses of humor, shared circle of friends—but there had always been something about Ryan that Simon had found inexplicable. He’d chalked it up to Ryan’s being American, and (he grudgingly acknowledged) younger, and since he generally found these antics of Ryan’s amusing, he hadn’t let it concern him.

In retrospect, perhaps it was a bit of a patronizing attitude to have, but then that had always been a part of their dynamic, in both directions—Simon to Ryan because of his age and puppy-dog-like exuberance, Ryan to Simon because of _his_ age and his occasionally baffled, fish-out-of-water approach to America and Americans in general.

But while Ryan’s many peculiarities had in no way diminished over the years, he had, nonetheless, grown up. Perhaps Simon hadn’t realized until now just how much.

Simon had 15 years on Ryan, 15 years of life and work and experience, but Simon had always been aware of Ryan catching up to him, right behind him, nipping at his heels.

This, though—this was something Simon had never done. And here Ryan was doing it, and doing it alone.

No, Ryan had not committed him to anything, had chosen to do this on his own, but what did that _mean_? What did it mean that he hadn’t asked Simon to take part in this? Hadn’t even really asked if Simon wanted to?

(Of course Simon _didn’t_ want to, but it would have been nice to be asked.)

He’d never minded Ryan having projects that didn’t involve him; _most_ of Ryan’s projects didn’t involve him, and that was for the best. He had been genuinely concerned at times that Ryan was overextending himself and would drive himself to collapse, but that was different. They’d always had other work and distinctly separate business interests, which rarely conflicted.

When Simon had officially decided to leave _American Idol_ , Ryan was the first person he’d told. They’d already discussed it at length in the months and years leading up to the announcement; it wasn’t really a surprise.

And Simon had been quick to reassure him that nothing would change between them. “I’m leaving the show,” he had told Ryan, “I’m not leaving _you_.” The bad blood had nothing to do with Ryan, who after all owned as little of _American Idol_ as Simon did, and he wouldn’t be away from the U.S. all that long.

Ryan had been emotional, of course, but he understood as well as Simon the forces that drove each of them to strive for bigger, better, _more_. He understood Simon’s dissatisfaction, his boredom, his need to have his own stake, to have control.

And so Simon had left the show, in order to launch a new one. And Ryan had stayed, and got himself a child.

Objectively, surely Simon’s new project is a much bigger deal: millions invested, hundreds employed, careers launched, lives changed. They’re already discussing an advert during the next Super Bowl. Having a child was downright dull in comparison.

So he can’t explain how it is he feels that what Ryan is doing is so much larger than anything either of them has ever done before.

Speeding down the 101 with a cigarette between the fingers of his free hand, he frowns. Was this what had so terrified him—the idea that Ryan might be doing something beyond Simon—that he might be _moving on_? He has something in his life now that’s bigger than either of them.

Shaking his head, he stubs out the remainder of the cigarette and resolves to put it out of his mind.


	5. The British Invasion

By August, the next time Simon’s back in L.A., Jenna is over her shyness, babbling to him, clinging to his hand with both of hers and dragging him around the house to show him her toys, her drawings, her swing set in the yard. She gets Simon to play with her, putting clothes on all her dolls, although Simon draws the line at playing dress-up himself, possibly because Ryan is hovering nearby with a glint in his eye and a camera phone in his hand.

Simon reads to her at bedtime again (this week it’s _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_ , every night, and no substitutes), then tucks her in, strokes her hair, and gives her a kiss on the head. Ryan still watches from the doorway, his heart beating at almost a normal rate.

When Simon turns on Jenna’s butterfly-shaped nightlight, Ryan heads toward the kitchen, where there’s a bottle of syrah open and waiting for them. A few minutes later, Simon joins him.

“She’s growing fast,” Simon says, standing on the opposite side of the kitchen island and pouring himself a generous glass. He sounds tired, but maybe, if Ryan’s not imagining it, pleased.

“I know. She’ll be reading that book to you before long.”

“At this rate she’ll have it memorized.”

Ryan smiles at him across the marble countertop, then looks away. “You’re good with her,” he tells his wineglass.

“It’s not exactly a challenge,” Simon answers.

They drink in companionable silence for a few minutes, until Simon sets his glass down and walks around the island to Ryan’s side. He takes Ryan’s face in his hands and presses a kiss to his lips, tasting of syrah. It’s a very good bottle.

Ryan loves kissing, and he’s good at it—one of his few talents—and how nice it had been to discover that Simon loved it and was good at it, too. They’d both be happy to stand there making out for ages, but it’s getting late. He’s about to suggest they move to the bedroom when a small sound has him shoving Simon away like he’s on fire.

In the wide kitchen doorway stands Jenna, three feet tall in pink footie pajamas.

“Hi,” Ryan says stupidly. He runs a hand through his hair, feeling his face turn red. “Sweetie, what are you doing up?”

Jenna looks back and forth between him and Simon, expression curious. In her usual small, squeaky voice, she asks, “What are you doing?”

Ryan can’t bring himself to look at Simon, who has backed up out of his range of vision, either out of deference to Ryan’s status as the parent, or because he’s a coward. “We’re having a grownup talk, sweetheart.”

Jenna stands on one foot and looks doubtful. “Are you kissing?”

Simon, out of sight, makes a noise Ryan can’t classify, but Ryan keeps his eyes on Jenna, who is still glancing between the two of them with big eyes. She looks ... Ryan can’t say how she looks. Not surprised, exactly. Not judgmental, but why would a small child be judgmental? He himself is blushing to the roots of his hair.

He swallows. “Yes,” he says. “We were kissing.”

Jenna peers at Simon and switches to standing on her other foot. “Can I have a glass of water?”

Ryan blinks. Is he going to get off this easy? “Sure, baby. I’ll get it for you.”

When he turns to get her a plastic sippy cup from the cabinet, he sees Simon standing several feet from him, face turned away. Ryan gets the cup, fills it with water from the fridge, and hands it to Jenna, who is now standing with both feet on the ground.

“Let’s get you back into bed,” he tells her, putting one hand on the top of her small head. She turns, obediently, and leads the way back to her room.

Later, having tucked her in and turned off the lights a second time, he comes back down to the kitchen, where he finds both their wineglasses still standing where they’d left them and Simon nowhere in sight.

He abandons the glasses and wanders. “Simon?” There’s no trace of him until Ryan happens to glance out the back window.

Outside, he finds Simon struggling with the latch on the industrial-grade childproof fence he’s had put around the swimming pool, seemingly sufficient to befuddle even 50-year-old children. Simon’s cigarette, forgotten, is burning out in the tray Ryan keeps there mostly for him.

“Well,” says Simon, not looking at him, still fiddling with the latch, “that was awkward.”

“No kidding,” Ryan mutters.

“I suppose it would have happened eventually.”

“Yeah. Look, I’ll talk to her. Tomorrow. I’ll explain that what she saw was ...”

Simon gives up on the pool fence. He retrieves his cigarette, frowns at the accumulation of ash, taps it off, and takes a drag. When he exhales, a cloud of smoke engulfs them both. “What?”

Ryan doesn’t know. He rolls his shoulders, trying to loosen some of the tension in them. “Private. A secret. Not a big deal. What do you want me to tell her?”

Simon smokes and is otherwise silent for a minute. “It’s your decision, Ryan. You’re her father. But if it were me, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Ryan turns, but Simon is still doing that annoying thing where he can’t be bothered to look at you, so Ryan has to glare at his profile. “Really.”

“Showing affection in front of your children can be a positive thing,” Simon continues. “You _should_ model a ... healthy expression of ... intimacy.”

Ryan gapes. “Thank you, Doctor Spock,” he says. “Since when are you an expert on childrearing?”

Simon still isn’t looking at him, but in the dim light Ryan thinks he can almost see Simon blushing. “Why aren’t _you_ an expert on childrearing? You’re the one who’s actually got _a child_.”

“I know what I’m doing, Simon. I don’t need your words of wisdom. I am doing just fine on my own.”

Simon scoffs. “Yes, just you and the housekeepers and the nannies and the bodyguard. This is Hollywood, darling, nobody raises kids ’on their own’.”

“So I have help,” Ryan says. “All the more reason I don’t need your critique.”

He starts pacing the lawn while Simon smokes.

“What if she decides to tell people about it?” Ryan says. “‘I saw Daddy kissing his friend Simon’? That wouldn’t worry you?”

“People have seen us kiss before, Ryan.”

“Yeah, adult people with a sense of discretion. Not little kids.”

“And so what if she tells someone? Who would she tell? Has she got an interview lined up with Anderson Cooper?”

“I don’t know why you’re so blasé about this.”

“She doesn’t care, Ryan.”

“I didn’t expect to have to deal with this now. I thought I’d have a few more years before ... well. Before things got complicated.”

Simon rolls his eyes at him on his way to put out the cigarette. “Because _this_ isn’t complicated.”

Finally, Ryan sighs. “I don’t want to fight about it.” He looks out at the city, spread out and lit up. He’s wound up, but he isn’t startled when he feels Simon’s arms come around him from behind, one hand on his abdomen, the other cupping his chin.

“Would you like to do something else instead?” Simon asks, and Ryan is grateful, because he really would.

* * *

A playset roughly the size of Disneyland goes up in Ryan’s backyard, followed by a pink and purple playhouse bigger than Ryan’s first apartment. They spend hours playing in and around it, and Ryan is glad he doesn’t have any masculinity left to compromise because this would definitely wipe him out.

One day he gets an unexpected package from England, addressed in neat blue cursive to _Mr Ryan and Miss Jenna Seacrest_ . He opens the box to find, carefully wrapped and well-padded, a beautiful little porcelain tea set, and a card from Simon’s mother. _For a Little Princess_ , it reads, and there’s a longer letter, as well:

_Dear Ryan,_

_I am so very happy to hear about your new daughter. Children are one of life’s great joys. Simon tells me you and Jenna are getting on very well. I am sure you’ll be an excellent father. I look forward to meeting Jenna the next time we’re all together. All my love to you both._

_Warmest wishes,_

_Julie_

When he shows it to Simon later, Simon looks uncomfortable. “She didn’t need to do that,” he says. “She’s got enough grandchildren of her own to dote on.”

“I thought it was sweet,” Ryan says.

“It’s not like Jenna can even play with that tea set. She’s too small, she’ll break every cup.”

“Yeah, but they’re pretty, and maybe she can play with them when she’s older.”

“I’ll tell her not to send anything else.”

“Don’t you dare,” Ryan says. “It was really sweet of her. I’m going to send her a card.”

“Don’t bother,” Simon says, and then changes the subject, but of course Ryan sends one anyway, because he was raised right.

One night in September, Ryan falls asleep immediately after they’ve finished having sex and forgets to kick Simon out. When he wakes up hours later, it’s still dark out, and Simon is asleep next to him, snoring quietly. He’s dressed in pajama pants and a white undershirt, which means he got out of bed long enough to make himself sort of decent in deference to Rule #1 (no sleeping naked now that the kid’s here), and then got back in bed, flagrantly ignoring Rule #2 (no spending the night now that the kid’s here). Ryan thinks about giving him a shove, but it’s already after 2:00 in the morning, and he’s exhausted, and what the hell.

After that, Simon starts sleeping over regularly, like in the pre-Jenna days. Jenna doesn’t seem to notice or care, although she’s happy to see Simon in the mornings, and it makes things easier in some ways. In other ways, it makes things harder. For instance, there’s the time Ryan wakes up alone in the middle of the night and finds the bedroom door open, and follows the sound of soft voices down the hall to Jenna’s room, where he finds Simon in the rocking chair, Jenna cuddled in his lap, the two of them conversing quietly about something in the light from the bedside lamp.

“We couldn’t sleep,” Simon explains, looking up at Ryan in the doorway, but the twist of his mouth and the nod of his head toward Jenna makes it clear who the instigator was.

“We couldn’t sleep, Daddy,” Jenna confirms, and then yawns as hugely as her tiny face will allow.

“Oh?” asks Ryan. “And are you feeling sleepy again now?”

“I think so,” Simon says, in that sing-songy tone he uses, as Jenna nods. “Up we go,” he says, standing with her in his arms and then placing her gently back in her bed. He pulls the comforter up to her chin and tucks her in. “All set, are we?”

Jenna nods a second time, evidently done talking for the evening, but as Simon starts to move away from her, she shifts in bed and whispers something to him that Ryan can’t hear.

Simon answers her quietly, just audible to Ryan, “I’ll tell you another story tomorrow, if you like,” and Jenna smiles.

A few moments later, walking back in the direction of his bedroom, Simon at his side, Ryan asks, “So what were you girls gabbing about in the middle of the night?”

Simon ignores the bait and says evenly, “She asked me to tell her a bedtime story, and I was happy to oblige.”

“What story?”

“A children’s story, Ryan.”

“ _What_ children’s story?” Ryan insists, and now that he’s pushing, he can sense Simon’s discomfort.

“ _Peter Pan_ ,” Simon says. “My mother used to read it to us when we were about her age.”

“Simon,” Ryan says, stopping at his bedroom doorway. Simon continues right past him and into the attached bathroom, and only then does Ryan reluctantly follow. “No orphan stories, remember?”

“It’s not an orphan story,” Simon insists, filling a tumbler with water from the sink. “Not a _sad_ orphan story, anyway. She was fine with it, Ryan. She liked it.”

Ryan pinches the bridge of his nose. “Please. Just—be careful, okay? I know she seems like a normal, happy kid, but this is stuff we’re going to have to deal with at some point—”

“And we _will_ , when it’s appropriate,” Simon says, placing his now-empty tumbler beside the sink, while Ryan’s eyes widen, because the _we_ he had meant was himself and Jenna. But Simon is looking at his own mirrored reflection and doesn’t notice Ryan’s surprise. “You worry too much. She’s obviously resilient. And I’m perfectly capable of telling a non-traumatizing children’s bedtime story.” Simon turns to look at Ryan. “Now, are you done fretting, and can we please go back to bed?”

Ryan leans against the doorjamb and a corner of his mouth quirks upward. “I don’t know. I’m not sleepy anymore. Maybe you should tell me a bedtime story, too.”

Simon is trying not to smile and mostly succeeding. “Do you know the one about the naughty television host and his incredibly handsome lover?”

Ryan, despite his tiredness, bursts out laughing. “I might need a refresher,” he says, backing into his bedroom. “Why don’t you come over here and show me?”

* * *

Simon goes back to London, and it’s just Ryan and Jenna for a while—as it was always going to be, his family of two. Ryan reads the bedtime stories, or Jenna’s nanny does, and everything is great.

One night over dinner, Jenna looks up at him from her bowl of macaroni and cheese (Ryan has a quinoa salad and spends much of the meal looking wistfully at her plate) and asks in her little voice, “Does Simon live with us?”

Ryan is caught off guard. “No, Simon doesn’t live here. He stays here sometimes, but he has his own house.”

Jenna stirs her spoon through the mac and cheese and looks thoughtful. “Why?”

Ryan is aware that he’s out of his depth here and mentally kicks himself for letting Simon stay overnight that first time. And every subsequent time. He’d promised himself, _promised_ that he would be better about navigating through the complexities of this new life, that he wouldn’t add even more confusion to Jenna’s already topsy-turvy world.

“Well,” he says, dragging the word out and stalling for time, “lots of people have ... different houses. Lots of people don’t live with us. Like Aunt Mere. And Grandma and Grandpa. And Aunt Ellen. They all live in their own houses. Sometimes they come to stay with us, but they don’t live with us here. That doesn’t mean they don’t _like_ us or aren’t ... part of our family.”

Jenna appears to ponder this, face as serious as can be. After a moment, she says, “Can I go to Simon’s house?”

Ryan blinks. “Why don’t you ask him, next time he’s here?” he offers, hoping that by the time that happens, she’ll have forgotten the idea altogether.

For now, it seems to satisfy her, and she shovels a spoonful of mac and cheese into her mouth and drops the subject.

But it’s only a week later that the hard-hitting questions start coming again. This time they’re on their way home from preschool, with Jenna strapped into her car seat in the back of the Range Rover—the only car he drives these days, as none of the others he owns are especially child-friendly—when a tiny voice pipes up, “Is Simon your best friend?”

Ryan likes to have fraught conversations while driving, if he has to have them at all. It’s so much easier to talk about serious topics when you don’t have to look at the other person, or when you _can’t_ look at the other person without driving off the road. He came out to his dad while driving. He told his mom he was dropping out of college and moving to L.A. while driving. All in all, this is less daunting.

“Simon is ... a very good friend,” he settles on saying. Then he frowns and glances, via the rear-view mirror, at the kid in the back. “Why do you ask?”

In the split second before the light turns green and he has to look forward again, he sees Jenna squirm in her seat, a closed-mouth smile.

“You’re _my_ best friend,” his daughter says, and Ryan wishes, _really_ wishes, that he wasn’t driving at that moment, and not only because it’s suddenly hard to see through his blurry eyes.


	6. Neverland

When Simon’s in L.A., they mostly text; when he’s in London, they mostly email. The contents of these emails rarely get much more profound than what each of them had for lunch and whatever the latest gossip is; neither of them trusts the security of their email accounts for much more.

They talk on the phone every other day or so, schedules and time zone differences permitting. Ryan never brings up Jenna until Simon asks, but as time passes, Simon starts to ask more: how is she, how is school, has she been sleeping through the night? And Ryan starts to offer more, in bits and pieces: how swimming class is going, what new foods she’s willing to eat this week, that she asked for Simon at bedtime last night.

“I asked for you at my bedtime, too,” Ryan jokes.

“ _Did_ you,” Simon half-purrs, and the conversation devolves from there.

If Jenna happens to be around for these chats, she always insists on speaking to Simon personally, taking Ryan’s phone carefully in her two small hands and telling Simon what she drew at preschool that day. It’s at the end of one of these conversations that Ryan hears Jenna tell Simon “I love you” in her small, high voice.

The first time Jenna had said those words to _him_ , he’d nearly wept. He’d been saying “I love you” to her every night at bedtime, every time he dropped her off at school or swim class, and what sometimes felt like every hour on the hour in between, just because he felt like it was true—and because he figured, all things considered, she couldn’t hear it too much or too often. He didn’t expect to hear the words back right away. After all, he was nearly a stranger to her in the beginning, and she’d already been through so much. But at the end of the first month (four weeks and three days), when she’d looked up at his face and said “I love you” back, his already-overgrown heart felt like it could have burst on the spot.

After that, she’d been free with her “I love you”s, saying them often to Ryan, to Ryan’s sister and parents, to her nanny and teachers, to stuffed animals and random dogs they met on the street. But she’d never said them to Simon before.

As a matter of fact, neither had Ryan.

Not that he didn’t love Simon; he did, in a way. But the words weren’t part of their relationship. They hadn’t signed on for that, and Simon most definitely hadn’t signed on for Jenna’s love, either. Ryan believed he was sincere when he said he liked kids, and that he liked Jenna in particular, but this was—

In half a second, he heard Simon, faint through the phone but distinctly warm and without hesitation, say _I love you, too, sweetheart_.

For a moment, Ryan was reminded of a time when Simon had called him “sweetheart” on _Idol_ , in that sneering, condescending tone he used when they were fighting for real and not fake fighting for the cameras or for their own entertainment, and Ryan had been so shocked—and so _utterly delighted_ , because Simon had said it _live_ , had screwed up and overplayed his hand, aiming for arch and superior and landing by accident somewhere on that ambiguous is-he-or-isn’t-he place he always tried so hard to avoid, and how much fun it had been for Ryan to swipe right back: _don’t call me_ sweetheart _, we don’t have that kind of relationship_ , and so on. Actually, they _had_ had that kind of relationship—the kind where Simon would sneeringly call him names and Ryan would be catty in return and later they’d end up fucking their brains out in a dressing room and Ryan would have bruises under his clothes the next day. Later, they would have a different kind of relationship; later, Simon would call him _sweetheart_ in private, sometimes teasing him, sometimes not, always with a smile, with warmth.

Ryan realizes he’s lost in thought when Jenna hands him back his phone—”Here, Daddy”—he hadn’t even heard her and Simon say their goodbyes. He snaps back to the present and holds the phone up to his own ear—”Hello?”—but Simon has already hung up.

* * *

In October, to belatedly celebrate Simon’s birthday, they meet in Miami for a week. The house, purchased some years ago under the name of one of Simon’s lawyers, is secluded enough that they don’t have to worry (much) about unexpected visitors with telephoto lenses, and big enough that they can invite a bunch of friends along and make a party of it. Half of Simon’s harem of exes/arm candy will be there with their own young children, so Ryan gives Ashleigh the week off and he and Jenna head southeast for some quality beach time.

Ryan and Claire do most of the cooking. Jenna gets along like gangbusters with Sinitta’s kids, and they all play together with minimal crying and hair-pulling, which is more than can be said for Simon’s girlfriends. Jenna’s swim classes are paying off; she splashes around in the shallow end of the pool, bright pink floaties on her arms, while Simon supervises her, and Ryan supervises Simon, looking for signs of boredom or annoyance. Later, after Simon has watched Jenna brush her teeth, after Ryan has tucked her into bed, after Jenna has conked out three sentences into her requested bedtime story, Ryan closes the kids’ bedroom door behind him and says to Simon, “And you’re _absolutely sure_ she’s not bothering you?”

“Ryan,” Simon chides as they head back downstairs to where the rest of the adult guests are lingering over wine and cigarettes.

“Because you can tell me. I won’t get mad. I swear. I know you didn’t sign up for this.”

Simon stops on the landing and looks at him. “I _told_ you you should go ahead and have a kid.”

“Ye-es,” Ryan says slowly, “and you also said you didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”

“That is _not_ —” Simon exhales, and ah, yes, _there’s_ the sign of irritation Ryan’s been searching for all day. “We have talked about this, at length. I do not want children of my own. But I am happy for you to have them, if that’s what you want. And I’m happy to spend time with them. With Jenna. You _know_ that, so _stop bringing it up_.”

Simon descends the stair without waiting for him. Ryan takes a moment. That was irritation, yes, but not the fun kind, the kind he sometimes liked to spark on purpose, riling Simon up for the hell of it (and for the punishment he’d get later).

But then it had been a long day in the sun for all of them, not just Jenna, and Simon is likely tired. Ryan follows him the rest of the way toward the sound of laughter and voices, resolving to make it an early-ish night, and to not raise the subject again.

* * *

Simon comes back to L.A. for a while after the Miami trip, which thrills Jenna to no end. He spends more nights at Ryan’s house than his own; with Jenna occupying so much of Ryan’s time, it’s practically the only way Ryan can see him. He stops asking Simon for reassurance and just lets Simon dictate how much time he wants to spend playing babysitter without comment. He does not, however, stop worrying that he and Jenna are imposing.

And so it is that he says to Simon, as they’re lounging on the sofa one evening, “Do you know what I need?”

“A firm spanking?”

Ryan smiles. “You and your thing for corporal punishment.” Then his mirth fades and he looks hard at Simon. “But—just to be clear—”

“I would never strike Jenna, Ryan. Or any other child.”

“Right,” Ryan says.

“That honor is reserved solely for you.”

“Thanks. In that case, you’re free on Friday, right?”

Simon gives him a suspicious look. “Why?”

“Ashleigh can stay overnight with Jenna, so I thought you and I might do something.”

Simon is still staring like he suspects Ryan of plotting something. “Like what?”

“Whatever you want. We could go out. We could stay in and I could cook. Or ... we could go out. You _do_ remember going out, right? It’s where we put on nice clothes—or I put on nice clothes, and you dress like a slob as usual—and we go to a club and drink cocktails and have adult conversations with each other. Maybe we eat a dinner that doesn’t involve pasta shaped like dinosaurs. Maybe we watch a movie with higher than a G rating. Then we come back home and screw each other’s brains out. Remember that, how we used to do that?”

Simon stares. After a moment, he says, “Are you all right?”

Ryan puts both hands on Simon’s shoulders, looks him in the eye, and says, “Take me out.”

Simon, eyes wide with fear, agrees.

They choose Las Vegas, a short trip in Simon’s plane. They travel with an entourage, as always—a few girls Ryan knows, a straight couple Simon knows—but after checking in at the hotel, they leave their friends to the casinos and duck out to Robuchon’s, just the two of them.

Over seafood and chardonnay in a private room, Ryan studies Simon’s face and thinks back on all the times he’s done this—watched Simon over food and drink and candlelight, sometimes the two of them alone, sometimes with friends—over the decade they’ve known each other.

Simon had been 42 when they first met, Ryan 27. Ryan had been thrilled to get the _Idol_ job, a major gig even if it only lasted the summer. It was a networking opportunity, a learning opportunity, and he’d been determined to make the most of it.

Every third guy he’d met on set was named Simon, and the rest seemed to be all Ians and Nigels. “They should call it _British Transplant Idol_ ,” Dunkelman had said, and Ryan had forced an unconvincing laugh.

Everyone had been friendly, professional—everyone, that is, except the Simon who would be judging the singers. Ryan had known Paula and Randy before the show, but Simon Cowell was new to him. And while at first it seemed to Ryan that Simon saw him as little more than a pest, a fly to be swatted out of the way, he quickly caught on that what Simon had been doing was the equivalent of pulling Ryan’s pigtails, that what the arrogant prick was actually doing was _flirting_ with him.

Maybe he should have taken Simon up on his offer of a fuck earlier; he’d just broken up with a boyfriend and God knows he’d found Simon attractive. Simon was exactly his type—older, just a bit bigger than him, powerful, cocky, a smart-ass—and worse, he had that accent, the one that made Ryan’s knees wobble. But he’d wanted to take the job seriously, and he’d wanted to _learn_ from Simon, not just fool around with him. Simon had been in the industry longer and was worth considerably more than Ryan himself was.

And after all, there were a million pretty boys in Hollywood—and he was one of them, and he knew all too well what that meant for people like Simon: a fun, easy lay to be quickly discarded.

How could any of them have predicted what course their lives would take? Ryan remembers with fondness how he and Simon would go out then, still low-profile enough that nobody would notice them, how they could go anywhere without attracting any more attention than any two random people. Before the fame, and the speculation. Those were good times, those early days. It would take years before they’d learn to stop touching each other in public.

He had always wanted to be Dick Clark, and he had always believed he would get there someday. He’d just never really realized what it would cost.

But he still had Simon. At least for now. _I’m leaving the show, I’m not leaving you_ , he had said before the news was made public, and Ryan had blinked back his tears and tried to believe it.

And Simon is here with him still, for now, despite the choices they made, despite the choice Ryan made—despite the fact that they barely had time to themselves anymore, the competing responsibilities in Ryan’s life, the organic juice boxes now outnumbering the wine bottles in the fridge, the gate installed around the pool, the scraped knees and tears. Despite the fact that last week Jenna had had a stomach bug and had gotten sick all over Simon, who had merely grimaced and handed her over to Ryan and Ashleigh and later made a grand dramatic production of throwing his t-shirt in the trash, which in Ryan’s opinion was where it had always belonged _anyway_ , although he refrained from saying so and had instead apologized repeatedly and offered to buy Simon a new shirt. (“They come in three-packs, right?” “Shut up, Ryan.”)

In spite of everything, for the time being, Simon is sticking around. Across the table, he seems to be deep in thought. “Care to share?” Ryan asks softly.

Simon blinks twice, stretches his arms over his head, and then inexplicably says, “We should call and check on the girls.”

Ryan frowns. “Rachel and Gina? Why? They’re probably busy losing all my money down at the Bellagio.”

Simon takes a sip from his glass and shakes his head minutely, his cheeks more flushed than they should be from the wine alone. “Not them. Ashleigh and Jenna.”

Ryan stares. After a moment, he asks, “Why?”

Simon won’t meet his eyes. “It’s Jenna’s bedtime,” he says. “We should say goodnight, at least.”

Ryan can only imagine the expression on his face. “We said goodnight before we left for the airport. They’re fine. Ashleigh’s got this. It’s not the first time she’s put her to bed.”

“Still,” Simon says, now looking completely away from Ryan, “it wouldn’t hurt to at least text.”

Ryan stares a bit longer, waiting for Simon to look at him, then inhales deeply and releases the breath through his nose. “Okay,” he says, withdrawing his phone from his pocket and unlocking it. “If you want to text, you can text. She’ll think we’re lunatics, but if it makes you happy ...” He offers the phone to Simon across the table.

But Simon ignores the phone, instead picking his own up from where it’s been sitting at the corner of the table. Ryan watches him tapping away at the keyboard and his eyes narrow. “... Who are you texting?” he asks, although the answer is obvious.

Sure enough, Simon looks up at him like he’s an idiot. “Ashleigh. As we were just discussing.”

Ryan’s eyebrows move skyward. “You have Ashleigh’s number.”

“Of course I have her number,” Simon says, apparently hitting the _send_ button and placing the phone back where it had been, screen dark.

“Are you trying to fuck my nanny?” Ryan asks, only mostly joking, but the withering look Simon gives him in response makes him regret it.

“Don’t be vulgar, Ryan,” he says. “We exchanged numbers in case of emergency. Besides,” he adds, corner of his mouth turning up, “she must be, oh, ten years too young for me.”

Ryan grins. “Try thirty, old man.”

Simon meets his grin. A split second later, his phone chimes. He checks it, and the smile turns softer.

“All right,” Ryan says, “hand it over.”

Simon places the phone in Ryan’s outstretched hand. On the screen, under the name Simon has entered as “Ashley” out of ignorance or, knowing Simon, in defiance of alternative spellings, are two messages. The first, from Simon, reads _Everyone OK?_ The second is a photo of Jenna, asleep in her bed, mouth slightly open, accompanied by one thumbs up emoji, a sleeping face emoji, and a note: _We read Harold and the purple crayon and she’s out like a light!_

Ryan stares at the picture for a moment before he forwards it to his own number. “I told you there was nothing to worry about.”

“And I told you there was nothing wrong with checking in on them.” Simon holds his hand out for the phone, and Ryan passes it back, letting his fingers touch Simon’s longer than necessary.

“Happy now?” he asks.

Simon taps out a quick reply to Ashleigh, then puts the phone in his pocket. When he meets Ryan’s eyes this time, there’s only warmth in them—and flirtation.

“Getting there,” he says. “But the night’s still young.”

They manage to find other topics to discuss over dinner, though a part of Ryan remains preoccupied. He’d planned this evening for the two of them, their first real time alone together since before Jenna, as much for Simon as for himself. He knows it can’t be easy on Simon to have to share Ryan with a small child, to have all their private moments under constant threat of interruption, to have Ryan always on the verge of distraction. He’d hoped this night out with no childcare responsibilities would be the break Simon needed—to really relax, to remember why he and Ryan were together in the first place. Yet it seemed even now, this far away, with capable Ashleigh in charge back home and nothing to worry or disturb them until the next morning, that the specter of Ryan’s decision still hung over Simon like a dark cloud.

Later, in the car on the way to meet their friends at the nightclub, Simon is looking out the window when he covers Ryan’s hand with his own.

“Oh, Jenna would _love_ that,” he says, nodding out the window at a sign advertising the aquarium at Mandalay Bay.

Ryan makes a noncommittal sound in his throat and turns his hand over in Simon’s, squeezing slightly and wondering how much longer he’ll be able to do so.

* * *

Eventually, Simon finishes his retelling of _Peter Pan_. That same night, after Jenna’s been put to bed, finds the two of them in a pair of recliners in the screening room, six-pack of Heineken between them, watching the Disney animated version from the 1950s and cringing. They both agree that Peter is kind of a dick, and Ryan thinks he’s a bit of a slut, too, what with Wendy and Tinkerbell and all the swooning mermaids. There’s way too much “children without mothers” crap; Ryan stares daggers at Simon, who sheepishly admits he’d forgotten that particular trope and that in his (and now Jenna’s) version, Peter Pan took Wendy to Neverland because he thought she was hot.

“This is kind of racist, isn’t it?” Ryan asks, mildly, after ten solid minutes of Indian stereotypes, and Simon almost chokes on his beer. They make half an attempt at inventing a drinking game but soon give up and stick to drinking at will. The unanimous verdict is that Jenna will be watching _The Princess and the Frog_ instead—not that unanimity matters, since Simon doesn’t technically get a vote.

“What do you mean, I don’t get to vote?” Simon asks. “I’ve just sat through that entire interminable cartoon, and I don’t get to vote?”

“You’re not her parent,” Ryan says, his voice flatter than he would have liked. He tries again, lighter: “You’re not even a citizen.”

Simon stretches in his recliner, fumbling for the mechanism to put it back upright so he can stand, and failing to engage it. He gives up, giggling, and takes another swig of his beer. “Though I seem to be a permanent resident of this chair.”

Ryan puts his own beer down and reaches across to help him, knocking an empty bottle onto the carpet with a dull thump. He flails at Simon’s armrest for a moment, but his reach isn’t long enough and the angle is impossible anyway. He gives up at the same moment that Simon takes his hand in his own and holds it, drunken-tenderly. They look at each other.

“Think happy thoughts,” Ryan advises.

“Have you got any pixie dust?” Simon manages, still laughing.


	7. Plate Tectonics

Jenna’s first Thanksgiving is spent in Atlanta with his folks, who have already put their Christmas tree up in the living room with more than a dozen gifts beneath it. When it comes to buying Jenna stuff she doesn’t need, his mom is the worst offender, besting even Simon, who in the last five months has not once returned from a trip without a stuffed animal or a doll or an extravagant outfit in size 2-4. After a series of negotiations, Ryan has at least managed to talk his parents into buying mostly books and practical clothing, but this is going to be their first Christmas with a grandkid, and all bets are off.

December flies past as it always does, a whirlwind of preparations for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and this year with Jenna in the mix he’s so busy he more or less forgets his own birthday until it’s December 24 and Simon is pressing three lavishly wrapped boxes into his hands.

“You shouldn’t have.”

Simon is in a good mood. “No, I shouldn’t have, but I did, so open them. That one first.”

“Let’s see.” Ryan gives the first parcel a shake but hears only a soft rustling. “You’re giving this to me now instead of waiting until my parents get here, so it’s either something _you’re_ embarrassed about, or something _I’m_ going to be embarrassed about.”

“Or,” says Simon, “I wanted to get it over with quickly, so we could move along to the part where it’s Christmas Eve and then Christmas, and _I_ get presents.”

“Touché.” Ryan tears through the paper, revealing a Burberry box beneath. Inside is a pair of cashmere and lambskin gloves.

“These are beautiful,” he says, trying one on and finding it a perfect fit. “Thank you.”

“Next one.”

The next box contains a Gieves and Hawkes scarf, dark blue and warm. “Wow,” he says, hoping the sincerity is coming through in his voice. It had been a while since Simon bought him something nice, useful, and neither ridiculous nor raunchy. “Thank you, Simon.”

“Wear them during your New Year’s Eve show.”

“You don’t watch my New Year’s Eve show.”

“I’ll watch it back later.”

There’s still one unopened box, roughly the same shape as the other two, but heavier. “A book?” Ryan guesses, but when he opens it, there’s a beautiful 8-by-12-inch silver frame inside, with a photo.

He recognizes the picture. It had been taken two months ago in Miami and showed their entire group, smiling and suntanned in casual clothes. Everyone was together in the shot, but people had congregated by family unit—parents with their kids, couples standing next to each other. It’s a good photo, although Jenna had been grumpy and refused to smile, her expression serious and a bit judgmental. Ryan was holding her, resting her on one hip and grinning. Simon stood beside them, one hand just visible on Ryan’s shoulder. Ryan wondered if Simon, in selecting this photo to have framed, had noticed.

“Just a little something to remember that holiday by,” Simon says.

“It’s a great picture.”

“I like Jenna’s stern, disapproving look.”

“Someone was overdue for a nap, if I remember right.” Simon had carried that same someone upstairs for said nap a few minutes after the picture had been taken.

They pass a few seconds in silence, looking at the photo.

“This is really nice, Simon. Thank you.”

“Happy birthday,” Simon says, leaning in for a kiss.

* * *

He does wear the gloves and scarf during the show, although they aren’t quite warm enough for Times Square at midnight.

* * *

Later in January he goes on the night show circuit to promote the new season of _Idol_ , and the conversation naturally turns to parenthood.

“So how do you get her to sleep at night, do you read her stories? Do you sing to her? And when you sing, does—does Simon Cowell pop up out of nowhere and critique your performance?”

Ryan laughs, the audience laughs, his charming host smiles. Simon is off the show this season and they’re not supposed to even mention his name; they’re supposed to be promoting the new replacement judges and the new format changes and pretending Simon never existed. “Actually, Randy Jackson sticks his head in the room and says, ’A bit pitchy, dawg.’” The audience laughs again, hopefully at his joke or at least at his terrible impression of Randy and not at his obvious discomfort.

Jenna is getting bigger every day, and bolder—testing her limits in a way that Ryan’s friends, pediatrician, and parenting blogs assure him is normal and healthy for a child her age. She throws tantrums; Ryan mostly manages to avoid just handing her over to Ashleigh at these times. He’s used to dealing with all manner of distraught _American Idol_ contestants; how hard can it be to handle a shrieking preschooler? As it turns out, the answer is _extremely hard_ , but Ryan perseveres, because he’s always believed that if there’s a job worth doing, it’s worth doing right. He treats parenting like work—and Ryan is good at work, Ryan _excels_ at work. And, nanny aside, he is the only parent Jenna’s got.

Not that that prevents the incident at the toy store. It’s Ashleigh’s day off, and he’d intended on taking them shopping, just the two of them. Simon had left the house early that morning, and Ryan hadn’t expected to see him again until later that night, if at all, so it comes as a surprise when he calls to see if they’re available for lunch.

Simon meets them in Brentwood, in a chipper mood, and insists on paying for not only lunch, but a trip to the toy store, which suggestion makes Jenna’s face light up like Hollywood Boulevard at night. Ryan tries not to let his irritation show. At last count, Jenna was going to bed each night with 22 stuffed animals—and those were just the top tier that had made the cut. She had an additional small army of plush animals and enough toys in her nursery that it resembled Santa’s workshop. Space wasn’t an issue, but Ryan was starting to worry about materialism and whether he might be raising a spoiled child—something Simon wouldn’t understand, being a spoiled child himself.

But Jenna is bouncing in her seat at the idea of going toy shopping with Simon, so Ryan grits his teeth and agrees, on the condition that she choose one—and only one—item.

That plan goes right out the window within five minutes of their arrival at the store, as Jenna scampers away, Simon behind her, both of them clutching greedily at the merchandise.

“One toy, Jenna,” Ryan calls after them in what he hopes is both a light and a firm tone.

Jenna dithers over a Barbie, a plush whale—is quickly distracted away from a child-sized drum kit—contemplates a set of ice cream-themed building blocks. Simon finds a _Sesame Street_ -themed Chutes and Ladders, but insists on calling it _Snakes_ and Ladders, on which basis Ryan makes him put it back.

In the end, it comes down to a Disney princess dollhouse and a playset of kitchenware for pretending to bake and decorate cupcakes. Jenna holds the bakeware and Simon the plastic castle, and they both look at Ryan, Jenna with her winningest politician’s smile and Simon cocky as usual.

“I said one toy, Jenna,” Ryan gently reminds, choosing to look at her and ignore Simon.

“Two toys,” Jenna says, still smiling, clearly ready to negotiate and confident she’s going to win.

“No,” Ryan says. “Not two toys. You have lots of toys at home. You can have _one_ today.”

Jenna’s smile starts to waver. “But Daddy—”

“No buts. I said one.”

When the tiny mouth turns down, Simon speaks up. “Oh, Ryan, let her have them both.”

Ryan purses his lips. “Simon, stay out of this.”

“Look, if it’s about money, _I’ll_ buy one of them,” Simon says, as if Ryan hadn’t made $65 million the previous year. Ryan gives him a glare.

“I said,” he repeats, very slowly, looking Simon straight in the eye, “one toy.”

“ _Daddy_ ,” Jenna whines, stamping one small foot. Ryan tenses. This is on the verge of getting ugly, but he cannot cede ground.

“Jenna, you can choose one toy, or you can have no toys, and we’ll leave the store right now.”

“ _Daddy—_ ”

“Ryan—”

“I said _stay out of it_ , Simon.” His voice is rising in volume, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else in this part of the shop.

Jenna flops to the ground with great drama, hiding her face, still clutching the bakeset and emitting a high-pitched sound somewhere between weeping and whining.

Ryan crouches to be closer to her level, and speaks softly. “Jenna, we’re not going to do this today. Okay? I said you could get one toy, you agreed to get one toy, and now you need to choose one toy. Do you want to talk about which toy you want?”

Even knowing it’s 90% an act, her sobs still rend his heart. “ _Nooo-ho-ho-ho_ ,” she cries.

“Okay. I’m going to count to five now, and then you pick the toy you want. If you can’t pick by the time I say ’five,’ we’re going to leave the store without buying anything.”

More sniffles and wails are the only answer.

“One ... two ...”

He hears Simon sigh and then feels him turn and walk a few paces away, clearly itching to say something else. Ryan braces himself, but the comment doesn’t come.

“... four ... five. What’s it going to be?”

She sniffles again, still refusing to look at Ryan, and then says, “The castle.”

He begins to relax. “Okay. Okay, I think that’s a good choice. Let me have this,” he says, reaching for the box of bakeware she still clutches in her arms. She grudgingly relinquishes it to him. “If you want to bake cupcakes later, when we’re back home, I’ll help you bake them for real, in the grown-up oven.”

This idea seems to cheer her up, and she allows Ryan to pull her to her feet and dust her off, straightening her wrinkled clothes, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and gently drying her tears. Ryan hands the cupcake playset to Simon, who is now standing a few feet away. “Will you put this back where you guys found it?”

Simon trades him the dollhouse for the bakeware and walks off without another word.

Ryan takes Jenna’s hand. “Let’s go pay for this at the front. Do you want to give the card to the lady?”

“Yeah,” Jenna says, apparently having forgotten what she was crying about only minutes earlier. “Can I put it in the machine?”

“We’ll see what kind of card reader they have,” Ryan says, deciding that Jenna’s budding interest in swiping credit cards was a problem he’d tackle some other day.

Simon meets them at the checkout, still silently brooding, though Jenna is all smiles. Ryan looks over at him only to have Simon’s gaze skirt away.

For a moment he thinks, with some bitterness, that it would be just like Simon to want all the fun parts of parenting with none of the responsibility. To be the “cool dad” while Ryan has to play the mean dad.

 But then he catches himself. Simon’s not the cool dad. He’s not a dad at all, and he never wanted to be, and Ryan knows that. He just needs to remember it if he’s going to keep from losing his mind—and, in all likelihood, finally losing Simon in the process.

* * *

Simon drops the bomb on him in February—while lounging in the bath, of all places.

“I’ve been thinking,” Simon says to the ceiling, “about selling the Beverly Hills house.”

Ryan is at the sink, shaving, and his hand tenses enough to nick himself. He hisses under his breath and moves the razor away from his cheek.

It’s not unexpected. Without _American Idol_ , Simon has far fewer reasons to be in L.A. He has a home and business commitments in the UK, and it’s been seeming more and more likely that the American _X Factor_ will film in Las Vegas. Even for someone with as much money as Simon, what was the point of keeping a house you never spent any time in?

Rationalizing it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

He’s been quiet too long, he realizes. Keeping his voice light and his eyes on his own face in the mirror, he asks, “So you’re definitely taking _X Factor_ to Vegas?”

“That seems to be the plan, yeah.”

Involuntarily, Ryan’s eyes shift, glancing in the mirror at Simon’s reflection. He’s just a head and one wet arm sticking out of the massive Jacuzzi tub, looking back at Ryan’s own reflected eyes, expression unreadable.

“Well,” says Ryan, “no reason to keep a place you’re never using.” Cautiously, he begins shaving again. “I always hated that house anyway.”

He doesn’t need to be looking at Simon to know Simon is rolling his eyes. “And what, exactly, is wrong with that house?”

“It’s ostentatious. Somehow it’s both ostentatious and completely sterile, which shouldn’t even be possible.”

“This from a man whose interior decorator was his mother.”

They fall silent for a while.

“Where are you planning to live in Vegas?”

“I’ll get something small, close to the theater. I don’t think I’ll be spending that much time there.”

Right. Ryan knows better. Simon will be in Vegas more nights than not.

Unless Simon means he won’t be staying all that many _years_ , but it’s not like Simon to go into a new venture already expecting it to fail.

He feels Simon’s eyes on him again. When he turns around, Simon looks oddly unsure of himself. It makes him seem vulnerable in a way that doesn’t sit well with Ryan. It’s rare to see Simon as anything less than completely confident, not to say _cocky_ , even when it’s just the two of them alone together.

“It’ll be great,” Ryan says. “I mean, it will be terrible, and not nearly as good as _Idol_ , and I’m going to mop the floor with you come awards season, and I’m sure whoever you hire as host will be a disgrace to the name, but—”

“I know.”

That gets his full attention. “You know?”

“Of course. No one could possibly host a television show as well as you do, Ryan. Your impeccable mastery of reading lines that someone else wrote from a teleprompter—”

“ _You_ can’t read off a teleprompter.”

“—and butchering bad jokes, and making everything slightly uncomfortable, is surpassed by none.”

“Oh, do shut up,” says Ryan, and turns to finish his shave.

* * *

One warm night in March after Jenna has gone to bed, while they’re outside by the pool, finishing off their second bottle of Malbec and gazing at the Los Angeles skyline, Simon suddenly says, “Oh, I almost forgot. I had Gemma look into local ballet programs today. She found two that could be a good fit. I’ve had her send over all the info.”

Ryan is feeling mellow, halfway through the second bottle of wine; it had been a good day at the station, a good day for Jenna, and Simon is obviously spending the night. L.A. twinkles in the darkness. He frowns. “You had your assistant ... look up ballet programs?”

“After-school programs, nothing too time-consuming.”

Ryan turns to him slowly. “What are you talking about?”

“For Jenna? She mentioned last week that she wanted to do ballet, and she’s been pirouetting around the house ever since.”

Ryan shakes his head, tightens his grip on the stem of his wineglass, and looks back out over the hills. “I don’t want her in ballet classes.”

Simon huffs a disbelieving laugh. “Why on earth not?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Wh—” Simon starts, stops, and without even turning to see, Ryan can _feel_ him tensing his jaw and looking affronted. “She wants to do ballet. She likes to dance. She’s a little girl, they love tutus and all that—” From the corner of his eye, Ryan can see Simon waving the hand not holding his glass. “—stuff.”

When Ryan doesn’t respond, Simon tries again. “You were looking for something for her to do—”

“Simon, I’ll—put her in kiddie karate or something.”

“Karate. Jenna. _Seriously_.”

“Look,” says Ryan. “My sister took ballet as a kid. It gives girls body issues.” He remembered the day his sister had come home from dance practice sobbing and had started tearing through the kitchen, dumping every bag of chips, box of cookies, and pint of ice cream in the trash before stomping off to her room and refusing dinner.

Simon frowns. “But your sister isn’t fat—”

“ _That’s not the point!_ ” And of course, _of course_ Simon wouldn’t get it, how the hell could he? “I just don’t want Jenna in that environment. She’s going to have it hard enough growing up in Hollywood, and with me as her dad.”

“Don’t you think you’re—”

“Damn it, Simon, it’s not your decision. _You’re not her parent_.”

He doesn’t look at Simon as he says this, not sure he wants to see Simon’s face or Simon to see his. He’s overreacting, and he knows it. Maybe not about the ballet thing—he’s entitled to say what activities his three-year-old can partake in, isn’t he? But he’s taking it too personally. He can hear it in his voice, and he feels a flush of embarrassment and regret.

For a moment the only sound is the wind through the trees, crickets in the bushes, the soft susurration of the pool filter. Then Ryan feels more than hears Simon shift in his chair, get up, and walk away without another word.

Ryan sits in his own chair a while longer, his embarrassment lingering and then fading, leaving him chilled in the temperate night air. He inhales deeply through his nose, smelling honeysuckle, Simon’s familiar cologne, and—

He takes a deeper whiff, leaning over the table between their two chairs. He smells ... nothing. He looks down at the ashtray on the table and then picks it up, squinting a little in the dim light. It’s clean.

He goes back inside the house. Simon isn’t in the kitchen or any of the rooms immediately nearby, so Ryan heads to their—to his—to the bedroom. But Simon is not to be found there either. He goes to the garage; Simon’s Bugatti Veyron is still there, parked in its designated spot out of view of prying paparazzi with drones. Ryan briefly tries to picture a car seat in it and shakes his head, hard.

So Simon hasn’t left, he’s still in the house—or on the grounds, anyway. He could be anywhere, could have gone anywhere in the main house, to any of the spare bedrooms, or hell, even the guesthouse—he knows where Ryan keeps the key. Why had Ryan bought this ridiculous oversized house anyway? He barely spends any time here himself. It’s a small miracle he hasn’t lost Jenna in it.

Probably he could track Simon down if he had an hour, but all at once he feels enormously tired. He goes to the adjoining bathroom and goes through his nighttime routine; comes back out, half expecting to see Simon on his side of the bed, sulking. But the bed is still empty, and when Ryan climbs into it, he sleeps poorly.

* * *

The following morning is Ryan’s day off, so he sleeps in until 6 and wakes from a dream of ballerinas, of Jenna in pink tights and tutu; of his sister, several years older than Jenna is now, hanging up her fraying dance shoes on the hook by the garage door.

Simon’s side of the bed is undisturbed. Ryan drags his feet getting up—too much wine or maybe too much sleep making him sluggish—but once he finishes a quick, hot shower, he starts to feel more like himself.

In the kitchen, Ashleigh and Jenna are sitting at the breakfast table, working their way through bowls of oatmeal, both looking more chipper than they have any right to.

“Good morning,” Ashleigh says, giving him a once-over that would embarrass him more if she hadn’t already seen him in worse states. And if there wasn’t that iron-clad NDA.

“Good morning, Daddy,” Jenna greets him, and he bends to kiss the top of her head.

“Youth is wasted on the young,” he says, settling into the chair next to Jenna, who wrinkles her nose.

“What does _that_ mean?”

“It means Daddy needs coffee,” says Ashleigh, rising from her own seat with that same look on her face and heading for the Jura.

“Daddy’s a little bit tired this morning, baby,” Ryan explains, shooting a half-hearted glare at Ashleigh’s back. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Did you have a bad dream?” Jenna’s face is solemn. She knows about bad dreams. Ashleigh places a steaming mug in front of him, along with a third bowl of oatmeal, and he wraps his hand around the coffee, nodding his thanks.

“Something like that,” he says, and takes a scalding sip. “But it’s okay. I feel a lot better now that I’m sitting down for breakfast with my best girl.”

Ashleigh clears her throat.

“My best _girls_ ,” he corrects, and earns twin smiles of approval.

At that moment Simon chooses to make his entrance, emerging from the far opposite side of the kitchen. Months ago, when Simon had started to take tentative first steps back into sleeping over, they’d made a token effort to disguise this fact—Ryan going to the kitchen alone for two mugs of coffee, claiming it had been a rough night and he needed them both; Simon coming through the garage as if he’d just driven up, fully dressed and showered and shaved. One morning Simon had walked into the kitchen in a bathrobe, mistakenly thinking it was Ashleigh’s day off, only to find her scrambling eggs and raising her eyebrows while Ryan cringed and avoided eye contact with everyone in the room. Simon had stood up straight and red-faced and had thanked Ryan stiffly for allowing him to sleep in “the guest suite,” confessing that he’d been “really, really ... ill” the night before but that he felt much better after spending the night in, again, the guest suite, and offering that he should probably be on his way.

Ashleigh had switched off the burner, put her hands on her hips, and said, “You know I signed a confidentiality agreement, right? And also that I already knew?” and started dishing out eggs onto the four plates she’d stacked next to the stovetop.

And that had been that.

(“You know, everybody already thinks you’re gay,” Ashleigh had said to him one night on her way out, as Ryan had escorted her to the door. He was still new to this whole “having a nanny” thing and wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to walk her out or not. “I thought you were gay before I started working for you.”

“Thanks,” Ryan had replied.

“I’m just saying. Everyone thinks it. So I don’t know what the big deal is. You could stop hiding and nobody would care.”

“It’s more complicated than that. I made a decision a long time ago. I don’t expect everyone to understand, but I do expect them to respect my choice.” He said the last part with his hand on the front door, not opening it until he was sure she had heard him.

Ashleigh had leveled him with a stare. “I’m not going to _out_ you. I signed an agreement. And I’m not that kind of person anyway. Also, you’re pretty terrifying. And I like you, besides.”

“I like you, too,” said Ryan. “Let’s keep it that way by never discussing this again?”

“I’m just saying,” Ashleigh had said again. But it hadn’t come up a second time.)

This morning Simon looks as bad as Ryan feels, although he’s as dressed and presentable as he’d been in the days when they were still pretending he wasn’t spending half his nights at Ryan’s. The bags under his eyes and the pallor in his face give him away: wherever he’d slept last night, it had been poorly.

“Good morning,” he says, upbeat and just this side of grating, and goes straight to the Jura.

“Good morning, Simon!” Jenna cries, and he throws her a quick, tired smile.

“Good morning, Jenna.”

Across the table, Ashleigh gives Ryan another look. He mimes _What?_ back at her.

“Jenna, are you about done with your oatmeal?” Ashleigh asks. At Jenna’s affirmative response, she stacks their two bowls and begins carrying them to the sink. “Then let’s go get you dressed for the day, okay?”

Simon remains at the coffee maker as Ashleigh hustles herself and her charge out of the kitchen. Ryan stares into his mug and waits a few beats after their departure before speaking.

“I’m sorry about last night. Yelling at you. I was out of line.”

Simon turns around, a mug in his own hand, his response immediate and obviously rehearsed. “Not at all, you were completely correct. Jenna is _your_ daughter and you’re entitled to decide what she is and isn’t allowed to do.”

“It’s not that I don’t want your opinions. I know you’ve been reading those books from the study,” Ryan adds, half teasing.

“It’s none of my business,” Simon says. “This is your area. _You_ are the parent. Not me.”

“No—” _Yes_ , he thinks, but— “No, I overreacted. You made a completely reasonable suggestion and I blew up at you. You had no way of knowing how I would feel about ... ballet,” he finished, a bit weakly.

There must be something in his expression. Simon’s eyes narrow for a moment and then his own face softens. He looks back down into his coffee mug. “You know she’s lucky to have you. No matter how ... _difficult_ ... it may be growing up in this environment. You’re a good parent. That will make up for any of the other stuff.”

Something tightens in Ryan’s chest. “How can you know that?”

“I know _you_ ,” says Simon, at last bringing his mug over to the table and taking the seat Jenna left, next to Ryan.

“She’s lucky to have you too, you know,” Ryan finds himself saying without thinking. “You’re great with her, you really are. _I’m_ lucky.” He shuts himself up with a swig of cooling coffee.

“Yes, you are,” Simon agrees, and Ryan smiles a little.

They drink their coffee in companionable silence, not quite looking at each other and not quite looking away. It’s long enough for Ryan to build up the nerve to ask, “Did you quit smoking?”

He’s fairly sure it isn’t the sip of coffee bringing that grimace to Simon’s face, nor the look of discomfort that follows. “I’ve cut back.”

“That’s great. I didn’t know.”

“It’s nothing.” Simon waves his empty hand dismissively. “Something I should’ve done ages ago.”

“I’m proud of you.”

“Don’t be condescending, Ryan.”

“So ... why now?”

“Why not now? You’ve been telling me to quit for years, haven’t you? You should be over the moon.”

“I am, I’m glad, I just never thought you’d actually listen to me.”

Simon takes a long sip from his mug. “It’s inconvenient. It’s getting to be practically impossible to smoke anywhere in public these days.”

“Well, I’m glad,” Ryan repeats, and then: “It’s better for Jenna, too.”

Simon’s mouth tightens for a split second and then relaxes. “I’ve never smoked in front of her, you know that.”

“I know. I just meant—you’re kind of a role model for her. She looks up to you.”

“I’ve never done anything to make her look up to me, either.”

“You’re an adult. She looks up to all the adults in her life. Especially the ones she sees the most. Me, you. Ashleigh.”

Simon levels him with a stare that could cut glass and says, “Is that a problem?”

Ryan has the uneasy but familiar sense that they’re talking past each other. “No, it’s not a problem. Why would it be a problem?”

Simon puts his half-empty mug down on the table. “What is it that you want from me?”

Ryan can’t tell whether it’s a question or an accusation. Simon looks like he isn’t sure, either.

“I don’t want anything from you. I just want things between us to stay the same. I never wanted this to change us.”

“Right,” Simon says. He doesn’t sound like he believes it.

“I’ve told you before, I don’t expect you to—to be involved with Jenna. Not like I am, I mean. I can be Jenna’s dad, and you and I can still be _us_ , and nothing has to change.”

“Do you think I’m spending too much time around her?”

“ _No_ ,” Ryan says, “god, no. Unless ... do _you_ think it’s too much?” That’s been his fear since day one, after all.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to do the right thing here. I’m just not sure what that is. If you want me to—to be around less, to give you and Jenna your space—”

“No. No,” Ryan says again, and this time he reaches over and grabs Simon by the wrist. “Jenna loves having you around. And so do I.”

“Daddy!”

Jenna appears in the kitchen again, Ashleigh on her heels, and makes a beeline for Ryan, who lets go of Simon to scoop her up into his lap. “Hi, sweetie. Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Jenna says, and then reaches one chubby little arm as far as she can across the table to Simon, a sheet of paper in her fingers. “I made this,” she says, a little shyly.

Simon accepts the page and turns it around, squinting at it without his reading glasses. He stares at the paper for a few long seconds before clearing his throat.

“This is very nice, Jenna,” he says. “A very good drawing.”

Simon stares at it for so long that it starts to get weird, but Jenna is still on Ryan’s lap, squirming in bashful pleasure at the praise, so Ryan only says, “May I see?”

Simon puts the paper down and slides it no more than an inch towards Ryan, then stands up.

“I’m going to take a shower and then head over to Fox,” he announces to the room. “I’ll text you later.” This last is for Ryan, Ryan assumes, but only because Simon is unlikely to say it to Ashleigh, and Jenna doesn’t text—or read. Simon doesn’t even look at him.

Frowning, Ryan slides the paper back his way and spins it around to take a look. It’s a plain white sheet with four crayon-drawn figures on it. The only one recognizable is Ashleigh—the yellow hair is a giveaway—but, helpfully, Jenna has written each person’s name beneath their image in her novice handwriting. Ashleigh’s name is spelled correctly, which means Ashleigh herself must have spelled it out. “Jenna,” “Daddy,” and “Simon” are somewhat easier for her. At the top of the page, in big letters, she’s written “MY FAMILY.”

Ryan studies the drawing for a moment, trying to school his face and voice into neutrality. “This is beautiful, Jenna. I especially like what you did with my hair.”

“And this is me in my pink dress,” Jenna says, pointing. The dress, a gift from Ellen K, is her favorite.

“I see. You’re a very good artist.”

Jenna preens. Ryan strokes her hair.

“We’ll have to put this up on the fridge,” he announces.


	8. When Wendy Grew Up

In April, Jenna turns four. Ryan, trying to make up for the first three birthdays, throws a massive party, with a tiered cake and a bouncy castle and an actual pony—or maybe it’s a miniature horse, he’s not clear on the distinction—and invites nearly everyone Jenna knows.

Simon had given his regrets, saying he would need to be in London that weekend, though Ryan got the impression that Simon was lying. He does call Jenna the morning of the party, wishing her a happy birthday, apologizing for his absence, and promising to bring her back something special from his trip.

Ryan had come close to asking Simon whether he’d be willing to have Ryan and Jenna fly over and meet up with him in London instead of having a party in L.A. Thanks to Simon (and Simon’s mum’s) influence—the tea sets and _Peter Pan_ and _Paddington Bear_ —she’s enamored of England, or at least a child-friendly, fictional idea of it, and the trip could have been a treat for her. For her and Ryan both.

There had been a time, years ago, when he’d made that trip as often as twice a month in the summer and fall, flying back and forth between England and Los Angeles so often that he was practically living out of a suitcase. They hadn’t been serious then. Not that they were serious now. Ryan had just been infatuated. It had been like an addiction. _Completely mad_ , in Simon’s words, but they’d been unable to stop, and every time Ryan touched down in Los Angeles, he’d start counting down the weeks, days, hours until he’d be on his way back again.

Of course they’re both older now. These days they’re so busy, and so aware of the public scrutiny into their travels, that they can’t manage it the way they did in the past.

These days Ryan isn’t even sure how welcome he’d be, him and his plus-one.

But Simon is back in L.A. the next weekend, in a good mood and bearing gifts. Jenna receives more toys she doesn’t need and an autographed copy of _Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone_ , which Simon says is the book’s “real,” British name.

“Will you read it to me tonight?” she asks Simon, tugging on the hem of his tee.

Simon’s smile is indulgent and, if Ryan’s not seeing things, just a bit sad, but he does stay, and he does read to her until it’s time for lights out.

Later, in Ryan’s bed, Simon is preoccupied again. There’s a book open on his lap, as there is on Ryan’s, and he’s wearing his reading glasses, but he hasn’t turned a page in five minutes when Ryan speaks up. “Everything all right?”

Simon blinks like he’d forgotten where he was and shifts on the bed, finally turning his page. “Fine.”

“You’ve seemed ... distracted lately.”

“I’ve been busy. Launching a show takes work.”

Launching a new show does take work, but that’s not everything, Ryan is sure of it.

Simon is prone to moodiness. He himself is the first to admit it. There are periods of time when he’s silent, when you can’t talk to him, when the only thing to do was give him space and leave him be. His friends know it, his staff know it—and anyone who doesn’t know finds out, sometimes the hard way.

Ryan has no problem with that. He couldn’t be more different from Simon in that respect, but if they were both grumpy bastards they probably would have imploded years ago.

But this isn’t that, either.

“Are we okay?”

At this, Simon turns to face Ryan, peering through the lenses of his glasses. For a moment, the lamp glints off them, and Ryan can’t see his eyes at all.

“Why wouldn’t we be okay?”

“I feel like you’ve been ... I don’t know, avoiding me, avoiding—us. If it’s Jenna—”

Simon groans, turning away and running his fingers through his hair as if he wants to tear it out. With one hand he removes his reading glasses and tosses them aside onto the bed; with the other he scrubs his face. “I’ve told you a hundred times, Ryan, _Jenna is not a problem_.”

Ryan picks up the discarded reading glasses and folds them closed. “Are you,” he says, and then stops. “Is there someone else? Besides me, I mean.”

It’s several seconds before Ryan can bring himself to look at Simon’s face again.

“Where on earth would I find the time to shag someone else?” Simon asks him quietly. “Ridiculous. No. There’s no one else. Besides—I’d _tell_ you if there was.”

Ryan meets his eyes and realizes that yeah, Simon _would_ tell him. Keeping someone on the side isn’t his style. It wouldn’t even be the first time, for either of them. They aren’t in that kind of relationship.

“Yeah, okay,” Ryan says.

Simon reaches across the few inches between them and strokes Ryan’s cheek, then runs his fingers down the side of Ryan’s neck, stopping to feel his pulse there.

“I’d tell you,” Simon says. “But there’s nothing to tell. It’s just you. Now shut up and hand me back those glasses.”

Ryan huffs a breath of quiet laughter and rolls back to his own side of the bed.

So Simon says he isn’t fucking around, and Ryan believes him, and he says it’s not Jenna either, and Ryan _almost_ believes that, too. But over the next few weeks Simon remains aloof and distant, spending more nights away from the house, and not always because he’s out of town. Ryan tries not to let it bother him. After all, it’s no worse than a few years ago, when apart from _Idol_ shooting days they hardly saw each other at all. It’s just that he’s gotten used to Simon being around more these last months—and worse, _Jenna_ misses him, and that’s painful to see.

Maybe it had been a mistake, he thinks, to have a kid while he and Simon were still nominally together, though no longer working together and barely living in the same city. Maybe he should have waited until the inevitable breakup, the one that’s been inching up on him like rising sea levels since the day Simon said he was leaving the show. Maybe _he_ should have been the one to dump _Simon_ , like ripping off a Band-Aid. Maybe he should never have let Simon and Jenna meet, so it would be only his heart that was going to break.

* * *

At the end of May, _Idol_ wraps its tenth season, still at the top of the ratings lists, up from the previous year. It’s a different show than the one Ryan signed on for all those years ago, the one that made him a star, the one that brought him and Simon together, but there are some things that never really change.

Simon congratulates him sincerely on a successful series. Jenna gets to stay up late for the wrap party, where she charms everyone. It’s been almost a full year since she came to live with him, and she’s grown so much in that time, physically and emotionally. She’s taller, and braver, and she talks more. She’s blossoming, and Ryan can’t wait to see what happens next.

Simon takes him out to dinner the next night to celebrate, somewhere quiet and private, just the two of them. He touches Ryan’s hand where it rests on the table, just a light brush of fingers, but it makes Ryan feel like maybe they’re going to be okay. Maybe Simon’s standoffishness was just a phase. They’ve made it through almost a year of Ryan’s parenthood—maybe this could actually, somehow, last.

* * *

Three days later at dinnertime, Jenna pokes listlessly at her food before slumping down in her seat and declaring that she isn’t hungry. Ryan cajoles her to eat one more piece of broccoli; she refuses, but that’s not unusual, so Ryan doesn’t take much note of it.

The next morning, though, when Ashleigh goes to get her out of bed for the day, she won’t budge.

“My tummy hurts,” she says after Ashleigh calls Ryan in a few minutes later. She’s pink and her forehead is warm to the touch, so Ashleigh goes for the thermometer while Ryan strokes her hair out of her sweaty face and frets.

Jenna registers a 100-degree temperature, which has Ryan scrolling through his BlackBerry for the pediatrician’s number before Ashleigh tells him to calm down, that this isn’t high enough to worry, that they should give her Children’s Tylenol and see what happens. Fifteen minutes of Googling and one call to his mom later, Ryan reluctantly agrees, and lets Ashleigh provide Jenna with Tylenol and apple juice while he wipes her little pink face with a cool washcloth. After 45 minutes, she goes back to sleep.

Ryan sits with her in the nursery with his BlackBerry while Ashleigh cleans up in the kitchen. Thus it is Ryan who is there when Jenna wakes up again after about an hour, says, “Daddy, I don’t feel good,” and proceeds to puke all over herself, the bed, and Ryan’s reaching forearms.

“Oh no, oh no no no, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Ryan says to both of them as he scoops the hot, wet, smelly mess of her into his arms and walks briskly to the nearest bathtub. “Okay, okay,” he keeps muttering as he sets her down in the tub and starts filling it with water just this side of lukewarm. “ASHLEIGH!”

“Oh, sh—” Ashleigh says when she appears in the bathroom doorway a few moments later. “I’ll get clean clothes.”

Ryan strips Jenna out of her pajamas and removes his own shirt, trying not to cringe too visibly at the mess, not that Jenna is paying him any attention. She had looked stunned in the minutes after hurling all over the place, as surprised as Ryan had felt, but now she’s glassy-eyed and tired.

“It’s okay,” Ryan tells her, wadding up the ruined clothes and shoving them out of the way. “It’s okay,” he says again, sloshing tepid water around her legs—already longer and less chubby than last year, he wonders whether she’ll end up taller than him, and how embarrassing would _that_ be—and taking a new washcloth to her mouth and chin, wiping them clean.

“Okay,” says Ashleigh, returning to the bathroom with a clean tee for Ryan and clean pajamas and underpants for Jenna, looking at her phone, “my mom says vomiting is okay, we just need to get her rehydrated with like Pedialyte or something, keep giving her fluids and rest and keep an eye on her temperature? And also keep her out of school?”

“Are you asking or telling?” Ryan says, squeezing the sodden washcloth over Jenna’s head, his free hand against her forehead to keep the water from running into her eyes.

“I mean,” says Ashleigh, voice hesitant, “you’re the dad. If you think we should call the doctor—”

“Call the doctor.”

While Ashleigh is on the phone with the pediatrician’s office, Ryan gets Jenna out of the tub and has her stand with her hands on his shoulders while he dries and re-dresses her. Her movements are sluggish, her eyes glazed. “Do you feel any better, baby?” he asks her, and she nods.

“My mouth tastes bad,” she admits, and a moment later Ashleigh is pressing a paper cup of water into Ryan’s hand.

Ryan is tucking Jenna back into her bed, newly made with clean sheets, when Ashleigh gets off the phone.

“What did they say?”

“They said to give her Pedialyte and make sure she rests and to keep monitoring her temperature,” Ashleigh says, flustered. “I told them all her symptoms ... you want me to sit with her for a while? You should probably take a shower,” she offers pointedly.

“Yeah. Come get me if anything happens,” Ryan says, and leaves to take the fastest shower of his life.

* * *

Jenna is asleep again, apparently peacefully, when Ryan returns, so he leaves her and Ashleigh and goes to his own bedroom to text his mother an update.

After that, hesitating for only a moment, he opens a message to Simon.

_J has stomach bug. Fever and vomiting. Probably best to keep your distance_

Maybe it’s redundant advice; Simon has been doing pretty good at keeping his distance already. The reply comes ten seconds later:

_When did this start? Everything ok?_

_Doc says to keep an eye on temp, give fluids. Two out of two moms agree_

There’s no response.

Ryan scrolls through his email. He sends off a few replies, then opens the browser and searches for “home remedies child fever.”

After thirty minutes, a new message appears.

_My mum always gave us burnt toast with jam_

Fifteen minutes later, the door chime announces that someone has let themselves in, and five minutes after that, Simon shows up in Ryan’s bedroom doorway.

Ryan can only gape at him. “Did you not read my text? It’s projectile vomiting over here. It’s like _The Exorcist.”_

“Ashleigh said she’s been sleeping.”

“Yeah, after upchucking all over herself. And me.”

“Then I’ll stay out of range,” Simon says, drily. “If you’d rather I leave, I will. If you would just say what you mean and tell me what you want—”

“We’re not having this fight again,” Ryan says, brushing past him and out of the room. “If you’re that fond of puking kids, you can take the shift after me.”

“I put the Pedialyte in the fridge,” Simon says to his back.

* * *

Over the next few hours, Jenna’s temperature rises slowly, while Ryan’s stress level rises in tandem. Ashleigh leaves as usual at 6, although she’d offered to stay later and demanded that Ryan call her if things got worse.

Jenna wakes up cranky around 7, but finding that Simon is there seems to lift her mood. Ryan carries her downstairs for a dinner of chicken noodle soup and, at Simon’s insistence, charred toast with grape jelly. She picks at her food for twenty minutes before Ryan gives up and clears the table.

She says her tummy still hurts, but she isn’t sleepy and doesn’t want to go back to bed, so they all go to watch a movie in the screening room. Ryan sorts through their options, Jenna rejecting all of them, until she finally agrees without much enthusiasm to watch _Tangled_ again.

The three of them settle on the couch, Ryan and Simon on either side of Jenna, and start the movie. Simon grabs a heavy blanket from the back of the sofa and tucks it around Jenna’s purple pajama-clad legs. Jenna might have said she wasn’t sleepy, but Ryan has to fight to keep his eyes open, looking back and forth between the screen and the still, small figure at his side. After a few minutes, she starts to list to her right, leaning against Simon, who has one arm on the back of the couch, his hand just a few inches from the nape of Ryan’s neck.

It’s Simon who notices first.

“Jenna,” Ryan hears, and then, “oh god, Jenna—Ryan, _do something_.”

Ryan’s first thought is another vomiting spell; then, that it’s Simon who is shaking her. But as Simon moves off the sofa and lays Jenna out flat across the seats he abruptly realizes that she is twitching all on her own.

Her body is stiff where it isn’t shaking, her face clammy and flushed.

“Jenna,” he says. “ _Jenna_ —”

Her eyes roll back and she doesn’t respond. 

“Call 911,” he tells Simon, rolling her gently onto her side without fully understanding why he’s doing it, some remnant from a first-aid class taken decades ago.

“Oh god,” Simon says again, but he’s already dialing the numbers and holding the phone to his ear. “Hello? Yes, we have an emergency at—”

Ryan tunes his voice out, focusing on Jenna, stroking her hair from her face and staring in horror as she jerks and twitches. “Oh, baby,” he whispers. “Oh, baby, hang on.”

* * *

Ryan wouldn’t call himself a control freak, but he’d gotten used to having a certain amount of power over his own life. After floating around from one short-term gig to the next in his early twenties, floundering to find his place in the industry, he’d managed to leverage hard work (and a little luck) into an empire. He’s succeeded beyond anything he’d imagined as a 19-year-old dropout with nothing but a few local radio credits to his name. Ryan likes control.

He’d known that he would have to give up some of that control when he became a parent, of course. He’d been ready for it, or so he’d thought. But nothing had prepared him for this feeling of powerlessness.

Minutes feel like hours as they wait for the ambulance; as they go to the hospital, Ryan in the back with Jenna, Simon following in his car; as they’re brought to an exam room. Jenna had been listless, then frightened, then nearly hysterical, curling up into herself and crying. Doctors come and go, asking the same questions, performing the same routines. The questions are directed half at him and half at Jenna. When a doctor or nurse is in the room, Simon retreats to the farthest corner, ducking his head as if doing so will prevent anyone from noticing him. When they’re alone, he wanders back to Jenna’s side, letting her hold onto his hand and whimper.

“You probably shouldn’t stay,” Ryan says to him, quiet enough that Jenna won’t hear. It’s almost midnight. He isn’t sure how long Simon has been awake since that morning. He also isn’t sure when the hospital staff will change shifts, meaning more people who will see Simon there, more people who might tell their friends or families what they saw in the ER that night. He’s noticed the double-takes, the whispers. One doctor, apparently not a reader of celebrity news, had asked which of them was Jenna’s legal father. Nobody else had had to.

“I don’t think she wants me to go,” Simon answers, both hands clasping one of Jenna’s and not looking at Ryan.

She’s taken for an ultrasound, then poked and prodded by yet another doctor, prompting still more tears. The clock on the wall ticks onward, marking 1 a.m., then 2. Jenna dozes. Simon paces. Ryan’s initial terror morphs into anger, which eventually gives way to numbness. He texts Ashleigh, his mom, his sister, his PA and his publicist. Once again, there’s nothing to do but wait.

Simon is jumpy, his jaw clenched. “This is intolerable,” he moans.

“I told you you should go home.”

Simon looks over and opens his mouth as if to snap something at Ryan, but subsides.

The last of the doctors finally returns, with a nurse and a verdict. “Everything points to appendicitis,” she tells them. Jenna is scheduled for surgery at 6 a.m. They only need a parent or guardian to sign the consent form. Ryan takes the clipboard from her.

At 5, the surgeon comes to Jenna’s room. At 5:30, she’s wheeled into the OR. Ryan holds her hand until the last possible moment, heart breaking inside his chest.

He and Simon are shown to a small waiting room, which is empty of people. Ryan isn’t sure if it’s the hour or if they’ve been brought somewhere private. They sit, one empty chair between them.

“It’s a routine surgery,” Ryan says. “Extremely common.”

Simon doesn’t respond.

At 6:30, Ashleigh arrives with four large paper cups in a cardboard holder.

“Four?” Ryan asks.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want coffee or tea, so I just got two of each,” she explains. “Ryan, I am so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“If we’d called the doctor sooner—”

“We still would have ended up here. Probably.” He gives her a weak smile. “Anyway, you were right. I’m the dad. And besides, she’ll be fine.”

“She’ll be fine,” Simon echoes dully.

And she is. After two hours, the surgeon meets them in the waiting room, pronounces the appendectomy a success, and outlines aftercare instructions. Ryan wipes tears from his eyes and babbles his thanks. The surgeon shakes everyone’s hands. Simon is silent the entire time.

A nurse walks them to Jenna’s room, explaining the recovery process to Ryan and Ashleigh in greater detail while Simon follows three steps behind with his head bowed.

Jenna is asleep, and the nurse assures them she’ll stay that way for several hours.

“Why don’t you go home and get some rest?” Ashleigh says. “I’ll call you when she wakes up.”

Ryan is on the verge of protesting, but he’s been awake for 30 hours at this point. The coffee Ashleigh brought, while thoughtful of her, isn’t helping. He can’t remember half of what the nurse just told him about Jenna’s aftercare, and the letters on the instruction sheets he’s been given are a blur. Although possibly that’s because his hands are shaking.

“Yeah, okay,” he agrees. “Call me the minute she’s awake, though.”

Simon continues to be silent on the walk to the garage where his car is parked.

“Are you okay to drive?” Ryan asks as they approach.

“I’m fine.”

He doesn’t look fine. He looks awful. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Silence falls again on the drive back. Ryan might nod off; he seems to blink and then they’re home, pulling into Simon’s usual spot in Ryan’s garage. Simon shuts off the ignition, but then makes no attempt to get out of the car. Neither does Ryan. His body feels too heavy to move.

“Are we just going to sleep here, then?”

Simon doesn’t answer. And then he does. “We need to talk.”

Ryan feels his stomach drop. “Oh yeah? What about?” He’s too tired to make his voice sound light.

Simon is staring forward, out the windshield, at the plain gray cement wall of the garage. His hands are limp in his lap, the car keys dropped into the cupholder. “This cannot go on, Ryan.”

So this is it. After all these months, almost a full year, this is finally it, and the axe is about to drop. Apparently Simon likes having difficult conversations in the car, too.

It takes Ryan a minute to reply. “Now? You’re doing this now? What am I saying, of course you’re doing this now.”

“We should have talked about it months ago.”

“All right, let’s have it, then. Spit it out.”

“Look, this was an idiotic plan, right from the start,” Simon sighs. “You have a child and I’m somehow _not_ involved?”

“That was the idea, yeah. You didn’t want to be involved, I kept you out of it.”

“Well, _I’m involved_ , all right? Like it or not, I _am_ involved.”

“I asked you a hundred times—I practically _begged_ you to tell me when it was too much—” He has to stop, his voice is threatening to break. “You said you were okay with this.”

“I was wrong. It’s not working, Ryan. Surely you can see that.”

Ryan is silent for a long while. He faces forward, unable to look at Simon’s profile anymore. Then he grabs the door handle and shoves his way out of the car.

“Then go. I’m not keeping you,” he says, and slams the door behind him.

He’s always known that it would come to this—he suspected it even before Simon announced his departure from the show—that this limbo he was in with Simon, this strange place in between sex and love, undefined but no less precious for it, would fracture and fall apart. Relationships likes theirs weren’t meant to last. He just hadn’t expected Simon to do it like this. For god’s sake, Simon couldn’t even wait until Jenna was awake, let alone released from the hospital and recovered. So he’s finally seen the uglier part of having a child, and he wants out. Immediately. Well, fine. That’s just fine.

The door to the house slams behind him. “You’ve not heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

“I heard you. You’re unhappy. I apologize. I’m going to sleep now. You can do what you want.”

“I want you to phone up your lawyer.”

“Jesus, Simon, now?” He’s almost shouting. “Don’t you think that can wait?”

“Tomorrow, then. I won’t be excluded any longer.”

“You can have the Miami house, I don’t care, I—wait, what do you mean, _excluded_? Excluded from what?”

Simon makes a frustrated gesture with his hand that could mean anything from _the foyer_ to _our relationship_ to _the world_.

“Simon.”

“With _Jenna_ , for Christ’s sake.”

Ryan stares, and blinks, trying to shake out the cobwebs of exhaustion and grief from his brain and translate from Simon to plain old American English. Simon loves a good tortured metaphor, but he usually deploys them on air, where everyone can be entertained by his biting wit. “What are you—I don’t exclude you. I invite you to everything, you see her all the time. You were just at the hospital with us. I—I didn’t think you _wanted_ to be included.”

“Well, I didn’t think so either, but you’ve rather forced my hand, haven’t you?”

That clears Ryan’s head. He’s suddenly furious. “I haven’t forced you into _anything_ , Simon. I’ve done _everything_ I possibly could to give you your space. I’ve made time for the two of us, I’ve kept things exactly the way they were before—”

“Yes,” Simon snaps at him, “you’ve done a brilliant job of keeping things _exactly as they were_ , but they’re _not_ anymore, are they?”

“No, they’re not! Because I have a kid now, and—” Ryan covers his face with his hands, rubbing at his tired, stinging eyes. “ _Simon_ . I’ve been awake for almost 36 hours. My daughter is in the hospital, recovering from major surgery. I’m not exactly at my best here, so _what the hell do you want from me?_ ”

Simon looks at him for a long time. Ryan watches as an amazing transformation takes place, as Simon’s expression melts from anger to what he recognizes as embarrassment.

Then Simon says, inexplicably, “I don’t want to get married.”

Ryan gapes. After a minute, he says, “I know you don’t. And I appreciate that.” Beard or not, Ryan has never slept with a married man and he has no intention of starting.

“It’s not personal, it’s nothing to do with you, I just—I don’t want to get married. To anyone. Ever.”

Ryan cocks his head. Is Simon actually talking about _them_? None of this makes sense, and he is so, so tired. “I know, Simon. It’s fine. I don’t want to get married, either.”

Simon hesitates. “But you have a child,” he says.

“Yeah. You can do that without being married these days.” Then he looks hard at Simon. “Do you think that my having a kid means I’m scamming for you to _marry_ me?”

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Simon protests, although he doesn’t seem to have any idea what he _is_ saying. “What I mean is,” turning the color of a ripe tomato, “I don’t want to be married, but I do want—I want to be—I want to have what you have with Jenna. To be involved. Legally. Officially,” he finally manages.

“That is,” he adds, looking queasy, “if that’s something you want.”

Ryan stares, replaying the conversation in his head to the best of his ability. He’s too tired for this. He needs to have been asleep twelve hours ago.

“No,” he says.

Simon’s eyebrows go up. “No?”

“No.”

Simon blinks at him. “Why not?”

“Simon—” Ryan pinches the bridge of his nose. “This is nuts. You’re not thinking clearly. We’ve just been through an awful, traumatizing experience, and we’re both sleep-deprived, and full of adrenaline. Adrenaline is what’s making you say this. And fear. You haven’t thought through any of this.”

As he makes this speech, Simon’s gaze drops to the floor. He looks lost. “I already added you both to my will,” he says.

“You—hang on, why? Do you think I’m going to leave her destitute?”

“There are ... things,” Simon says, still looking anywhere but at Ryan, “personal items ... that I want you each to have.”

“That’s not the same thing, and you know it. Just because you care about someone—look, don’t tell me you want to adopt every person listed in your will.”

“Of course not, but—what if what happened last night were to happen when you weren’t there? What if something were to happen to _you_?”

Ryan crosses his arms. “Jenna is never alone. She always has me, a nanny, a teacher, or another adult family member right nearby. You said it yourself: nobody in Hollywood raises their kids alone. And if something happens to me, she’ll live with my mom and dad.”

The lack of sleep must be making him hallucinate the hurt he sees in Simon’s eyes. “With your parents. In Atlanta. You’d make Jenna move to Atlanta.”

“Atlanta is a great place for a kid to grow up. _I_ grew up in Atlanta. It would be better for her than L.A.”

“You wouldn’t even consider letting her live with me.”

“Simon, you don’t even live here half the year! You don’t live in one place! You said you were going to sell your house!”

“I thought you would ask me to move in here,” Simon says—so great, now Ryan is having auditory hallucinations as well.

“Simon, shut up,” he says. “I am going upstairs, and I am going to sleep. You can come with me or not. But we are not talking about this. Not until I’ve had at least four hours and my kid is out of the hospital.”

Taking a nap at 10:00 in the morning is not something Ryan is used to, but it turns out to be just a matter of finding his way to the bed without stumbling into a door or tripping over his own feet. He’s asleep almost before he’s horizontal.

Sometime later, he has no idea when, he feels the dip of the mattress that is Simon. He doesn’t open his eyes.

Sometime after that, he dreams that Simon has moved over into his side of the bed and has wrapped Ryan up in his arms, cuddling him the way he only ever does after sex. Neither of them has ever been able to sleep that way.

“Thought you were leaving us,” dream Ryan slurs.

“Why would I leave you,” dream Simon whispers back. “You little idiot. I love you.”

“Mmm,” dream Ryan agrees. “Love you too.”


	9. California King

Jenna returns from hospital two days later.

If Ryan thought the stuffed animal situation was a problem before, even Simon can agree it’s now a crisis. Gifts from well-wishers are pouring in from every side, including a monstrous bouquet of pink roses from his mum, which he really will have to have a word with her about, regardless of what Ryan thinks.

Simon had been restricted to a single gift, and he’d honoured that, though Ryan claimed that buying a bear larger than Jenna herself was “cheating.” He’d had a few inches of pink thread sewn into the toy’s belly, in roughly the same position as Jenna’s new appendectomy scar.

He is trying. After all, he has an argument to win, and with Ryan, one has to tread a fine line between teasing and complete disrespect. Ryan likes a bit of a tussle, enjoys the back-and-forth of arguing with Simon, but it doesn’t pay to push him too far, especially not where Jenna is concerned.

Jenna herself is in excellent form. Far from being traumatized by the experience, she comes home declaring that she wants to be a doctor when she grows up and begins performing “surgery” on her toys with a plastic butter knife. Before long her collection grows to include a stethoscope and a child-sized white lab coat. Ryan is more sanguine about toys that he can classify as “educational.” Simon agrees that it’s good to encourage this sort of ambition; Jenna’s previous career goals included being a princess, a ballerina, “a horse,” and most concerning, “on TV like Daddy.”

Inspired, Simon has his PA look up summer science camps for girls in southern California and send over all the info she can find. He leaves the print-outs on Ryan’s bedside table with a sticky note attached: _ONLY IF YOU APPROVE OF COURSE_.

This is an argument he is absolutely going to win.

Ryan had been half right, which was just another way of saying he’d been half wrong. No, Simon hadn’t really thought through all the repercussions of what he’d proposed, that much was true. But it hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment request, either. His nebulous status in their little trio had been nagging at him for months. One day everything would be perfect and the next day Ryan would be shutting him out again, like a skittish animal. It’s frustrating not knowing where he stands, not knowing when he might overstep the invisible boundaries Ryan has drawn and get another slap on the wrist for his troubles: _you’re not part of this, you’re not her father._

Well, father or not, he _is_ part of this. And the most surprising thing is how _fine_ he is with it all. He reckons he ought to feel bitter. He hadn’t wanted this. When he was fifteen, his older half-brother had slapped him on the back, handed him a package of rubbers, and told him to always use them lest some girl try to “trap” him into marrying her. The fact that Simon had been two when his mother had married his and Tony’s father did not make this advice sit particularly well with him. Still, he took it to heart. Even if his own parents remained blissfully married for nearly 40 years before his father’s death, he knew of enough unhappy marriages that had started or been dragged out for the sake of a child. And Simon hadn’t wanted a child or a family. Not until now, not until this particular child, this _particular_ family.

Now he has it, and he wants to keep it—if he can just get Ryan to understand.

He hasn’t brought it up again since the day of Jenna’s surgery. In hindsight, perhaps it had been bad timing. He could have led up to it better. But then how was he to know that Ryan would get it all so completely backwards? Or be so angry?

The first anniversary of Jenna’s adoption comes within days of her return from hospital. To mark the occasion, they have a small party at the house with a handful of Ryan’s closest friends and family.

A week later is Father’s Day. Jenna gives Ryan a card made of paper, dry pasta, and glitter, which Ryan promises to put on his desk. Simon gives Ryan a Piaget watch, which after some deliberation he’d had engraved _Love always, S_. It’s a bit sappy, but Ryan likes sappy. If Simon is being honest, he rather likes sappy as well.

He’d had in mind some type of joke about time, _sorry about my bad timing_ or perhaps _hurry up and let me do this_ , but he wasn’t sure how Ryan would take it, so he held off.

Later that night, after removing the watch before bed, Ryan spends a long time looking at the engraving on the back.

“Do you like it?” Simon asks.

“I do,” Ryan says, smiling at him. Simon smiles back. He already knew Ryan liked it, but it never hurt to hear it again.

Ryan’s smile fades a little. “I actually have something for you, too.”

“For me?”

Ryan goes round to his side of the bed and sits down, back against the headboard, legs crossed in front of him. He opens the drawer of his bedside table and withdraws a plain manila folder, which he hands to Simon. “I don’t want you to say anything until I’m done talking, all right? I know that’s hard for you, but just—please let me finish.”

He quiets, which Simon takes at his cue to open the folder. Inside is a stack of papers. The headline on the first page reads _Second-Parent Adoption_.

“We haven’t talked about it since that day after the surgery, and we were both pretty out of it then, so I don’t know if you were serious or even completely _awake_ at the time, and even if you were you might have changed your mind since then, which would be fine and totally understandable. I just want you to know that, first off.”

“Ryan—”

“ _Shh._ Let me finish. This is just information, nothing else. I haven’t talked to my adoption lawyer, I just went online. I figured odds were good that you’d done no research on this at all. And it’s complicated. I mean, of course it is. But our ... situation ... makes it even more complicated.” He takes a deep breath. “There are a lot of things that would have to change before we’d even have a chance of getting you approved. And that’s assuming you’re even interested. And that _I’m_ interested, which I’m ... not sure I am,” he finishes with a hint of apology.

“If you’re not sure whether you’re interested,” Simon says slowly, waiting for Ryan to shush him again, “why did you bother looking this up?”

“I said I’m not sure. I’m not definitely saying no, never, not a chance. I _am_ saying—it would take a while. In fact, I don’t even want to discuss it until next year at the earliest.”

“Next _year_? Then what is the point of—”

“Look. I’ve known I wanted kids for most of my life. You’ve been thinking about it for, what, six months? At the most? I don’t want you to rush into this only to regret it a year from now. It would devastate her.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“Everything I’ve read about being a single parent and dating says you don’t introduce your child to a new potential boyfriend right away.”

“Ryan. We’ve been together _ten years_.”

“I know, but—we don’t really _talk_ about it, do we?”

“And you’ve already introduced me to her; I practically live here.”

“I know. I know we’ve been doing this all out of order. But we need to start doing it _right_ now. And we’d need to have a serious talk about parenting styles. A lot of serious talks. It can’t always be you with the giant teddy bears and the toys and the fun, and me being the bad guy. It has to be 50-50. I don’t even know what kind of parenting _philosophy_ you believe in. I mean, I know you pretty well, but even people you know well can have weird ideas about how kids should be raised. We’ve never really talked about that.”

“Pro vaccinations, anti co-sleeping, pro making Ashleigh give the sex talk.” Simon ticks them off on his fingers. “What else?”

Ryan ignores him. “And don’t take this the wrong way, but you know you have a tendency to try to—well, one-up me. I need to know that this is sincere, that you’re not just trying to undercut what I’m doing because you’re jealous and you want to play with my toys.”

“Your _toys_?”

“You know what I mean.”

Simon studies the first page again. _Second-Parent Adoption_. “So what exactly are you telling me?”

Ryan sighs. “I’m telling you ... that if you want to keep thinking about it, then I’m okay with you thinking about it. “

“Oh, thank you, Ryan. That’s so generous of you.”

“Shut it. And I’ll think about it, too. And we can ... talk more, about stuff related to Jenna. I’ll try to stop treating you like some kind of interloper. Because you’re not. I don’t think of you that way.”

Ryan reaches across the bed and takes Simon’s hand. He squeezes it.

“I just want you to really think through the implications. _All_ the implications,” he says meaningfully. “Because we can try to keep it quiet, but that will only last so long, so—you have to realize what it would look like. You have to know what people will say.”

Simon thinks about it. He thinks about work, about reputation, about money, about the show he’s launching in just a few months. He thinks about his father, and his mother. He thinks about the course his life has taken to bring him here, lying in this bed beside this man who means so much to him, with a little girl asleep down the hall who means just as much.

“Six months,” he says.

Ryan frowns. “Come again?”

“Six months from now will be December. _X Factor_ will have wrapped its first season and been a smash hit. If we both still want to do this in December, then you already know what to get me for Christmas. We can sign the papers in January, that will be your ’next year.’ Done and dusted. Do we have a deal?”

Ryan’s smile is slow, and wobbly, but it’s at least a smile. “You know it won’t be that simple.”

“Darling,” Simon says, “nothing we do ever is. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally this was going to be two different stories, one very short kid fic and one medium-length _dog_ fic, but I was working on them both simultaneously and this one took over. I offer sincere apologies to people who prefer dog fic to kid fic—me too, but this is what we ended up with. I'm not going to finish the dog story, but here's the beginning of it, because I'm really sort of proud of it, and because there’s no way I could repurpose this for another fandom:
> 
> "You should get a poodle," Ellen had said one morning on the radio.
> 
> “Yeah,” Ryan said dryly. “That will really help with my masculine image.”
> 
> At the E! studios, Joel McHale had tried to sell him on the idea of a chihuahua. "You could carry it around in a shoulder bag like Paris Hilton,” he’d said. “Get a girl one—she and Lou could make little incestuous E! puppies. New reality show, Ryan!”
> 
> Khloe had suggested a small dog, too. “It would make you look taller,” she advised.
> 
> On the other hand, Paul and Clare were pulling for a Great Dane, another big dog to add to the pack. Everyone he knew had an opinion about what kind he should get—or whether he should get a dog at all, with his schedule being what it was. And he understood: his schedule was brutal. It would be a sacrifice to add a new member to his family.
> 
> The dog he did get turned out to be a two-year-old white lab mix. In the end, his assistant found the dog for him, after he first tried to look through the shelter's website himself and then spent the next hour crying over the photos. Belinda was made of stronger stuff. She had to be; that's why he'd hired her. Not to profile adoptable dogs particularly, but this was was L.A. Cutthroat was a job requirement.
> 
> He met Belinda and the dog at the shelter. She came up to his knee. The dog, that is—Belinda, as always, was three inches taller than him in heels.
> 
> "Hey, girl," he said, crouching to greet the dog. Her tail wagged so hard it took her entire back half along with it. He scratched her downy ears and ran his fingers through the thick fur at the back of her head. He arched his neck with a grimace as she tried to lick his face, but she didn't appear offended by the rejection.
> 
> "She's spayed and up to date on all her shots," Belinda said.
> 
> Ryan smiled. The dog smiled back, or so it seemed.
> 
> "What's her name?" he asked.
> 
> "Bailey," Belinda said.
> 
> "Bailey," Ryan repeated, and Bailey wagged her tail even harder, if that was possible, in recognition of her own name.
> 
> He was utterly in love.


End file.
